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Mir Won't Ship Even In Ubuntu 14.04
jones_supa writes "As can be recalled, Mir didn't make it to the Ubuntu 13.10 release to replace X.org as the display server. Back then it suffered of problems in multi-monitor support, along with other issues. Now it turns out that Canonical's product will not make it even into the next LTS version (14.04) of the Ubuntu desktop. Mir itself would be ready for showtime in the schedule, but there are problems with XMir, which is the X11 compatibility layer that ensures Mir can work with applications built for X. The comments came at the Ubuntu Developer Summit: in an online event Mark Shuttleworth stressed that the 14.04 desktop has to be rock-solid for customers with large-scale deployments, such as educational institutions. In the meantime, you can already try out Mir in your Ubuntu system."
I think Mir might eventually replace X. It's already been replacing Hurd for quite some time.
Taken on its own, it does make sense. LTS needs to be usable (technically, inb4 "unity") on the widest practical range of hardware and be supported for 3 years. If Mir needs to be delayed so X applications can run on 14.04, so be it.
You have the hubris to say that you are going to fix everything that is wrong with X11 / X.org AND also provide a compatibility layer on top of your new shiny solution to support running the programs that still use the thing you are claiming to fix ... and now you are surprised because getting said compatibility layer right turned out to be thornier than you had expected?
Several years ago I wrote a transport mechanism on top of VNC that allowed you to access high end graphics services (read OpenGL) from devices without any hardware acceleration to speak of (back then it was an ipaq). I did the initial implementation in one evening, which worked for 80% of the use cases. Together with another developer, it took us probably a month to get it to 90%. A third party worked for half a year to get it to 95%. Several years later it was up to 98%... maybe.
Whenever you try to pull this kind of stunt off, you are going to run into the same situation. Most of the stuff that you are interested in is easy. Then there's the stuff that makes "creative" uses of existing APIs. And then there's the stuff that works because of, not despite of, existing implementation bugs. And then you run into the really weird...
I left Ubuntu after they went to Unity.
You can still use Ubuntu with any window manager of your choosing, and it works just fine. I hate Unity too, but it's much easier to install GNOME or KDE to Ubuntu (apt-get install ...) than to switch distros. The problem with Mint seems to be that they have some security issues that are not a problem with Ubuntu (assuming you kill the phone-home features, like this.)
Ubuntu reigns king
Forces Unity on users
Its own crown of thorns
I get why some people might hate Unity (I'm one of them). I get why some people might hate Ubuntu (I'm not one of those), or might not want to use it on their hotrod machine (e.g. one of my boxes runs Gentoo instead, and yes, I do all the "ricer" stereotype stuff on that one, even).
What I don't get, is why someone who otherwise doesn't hate Ubuntu, but does hate Unity, would let it alter their decision to use Ubuntu. There's nothing about Ubuntu that means you have to use Unity, or that it's even "hard" to not use Unity.
Xubuntu FTW. You get Ubuntu's "mainstreaminess" so that whatever software you want, has already been ported and already has a relatively recent (!) (take that, Debian) binary just waiting for you to effortlessly install. And you get XFCE's non-suckiness. (Or Gnome or KDE or whatever you prefer; everything is available.) What's not to like?
Why are people still struggling with this? I mean, why is it so technically challenging? It's a simple concept and it's been around for years...
I don't have an opinion about Mir and I don't want to express my opinions about last Canonical moves here. What I want to say is that it would be Canonical interest to delay LTS to not risk Mir to become marginal in the years to follow. There would be nothing bad about this move: people that like to stay cut-edge will enjoy a regular 14.04 release. People that need stability will just keep 12.04 another six months.
not that i've heard
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"that they have some security issues" ---aahh you are that canonical developer making the news this week with that ascertion....
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Well, guys. As Mir can now be relatively easily installed, I'd like to hear comments about your experience with it.
I simply switched desktops. I now run Mate on Ubuntu 12.04.
Would that be the Ubuntu or Debian edition of Mint?
This might pretty much kill Mir. By the time is released Wayland will likely have taken over and even if Mir is better it will be a case of "too little, too late".
The one thing HURD hasn't tried so far is the Minix 3.x microkernel. Seriously, they should fork it to GPL3, then use that as their microkernel, and build the HURD daemons over it. Other than that, they tried all fringe microkernels, but none of the real ones, like Minix, Chorus, or any other
Given that it's also (dual) licensed under GPLv3, it could. Contrast that to both X11 & Wayland, both of which are licensed just under the X11 license. So if either Canonical does HURD or HURD does Mir, it would be a match made in....
Which unfortunately just tells all of us that have actually done a lot with multiple screens on MS Windows. Those who have done it dozens of times have seen quite a few problems and had to use many workarounds and seen how it behaves differently depending on which third party tool is used. My most recent hassle was four screens, a cloned two screen desktop - initially using two different video cards. Easy in X but an utter time wasting pain in the neck with having to use a third bit of hardware, the onboard video, in Win7 simply because the options were greyed out in the GUI and inaccessible. That setup was unstable - it required to be configured all over again if somebody didn't turn all the screens on before starting up. That's an unforgivable flaw in 2013. While the X answer was a minute of config options, that stayed put and did not vanish, the MS Windows answer was ultimately to get different hardware so the setup was simpler. It still fucks up on occasion if screens are not turned on before MS Windows starts up.
What problem is solved by Mir, after all? I understand X11 is a bloated API, but it works, doesn't it?
I simply switched desktops. I now run Mate on Ubuntu 12.04.
How well does that work?
Do you still get the ease of doing dist-update under Ubuntu?
I dont read
Considering a lot of the people working on Wayland are those that worked on X, I don't think NIH applies.
Wayland is "X is deficient, it's not good enough, and efforts to improve it have been clunky hacks. To actually improve, much of it must be rewritten. Let's just write a new one."
Mir is "Oh, shit, they're writing a new X? Uh, it's ... not ours. We're going to do it too! We'll make OUR OWN NEW X, that we can ship with OUR system, and it'll be OURS because WE WROTE IT because WE DON'T WANT YOUR JUNK!"
Wayland doesn't have a distribution. They're not RedHat or SuSE. The people writing it are just trying to build a better X. Mir came about when Canonical saw a better X being built and decided to head it off by building their own better X, instead of contributing to help the better X come about faster and with more features relevant to their distribution.
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Interesting myth but still a myth. Track it back and you'll find it has no substance other than Kieth Packard wishing them good luck and one guy that worked briefly on one module starting Wayland.
If you hadn't ticked "Post Anonymously" I would take you more seriously. "Mr D" is it? Do you really think I'd believe somebody who doesn't care enough about this place to get a login would care enough to take me to task for being increasingly blunt to the poster above?
As for the downmodding - it's a waste of time for a single person to try to chew into someone's karma like that so I really don't know why you bothered - amusing that you are giving me the "warning" after you did it to those DMCA posts that shouldn't have got anyone upset. Keep at it if you are bored enough but it will take a long time and there are better things to do.
As for me, I'd prefer to discuss X or whatever the topic of the day is (and yes, I and many others on this site DO know a lot about many things and are experts on some of it - you can be too if you keep your eyes open long enough) instead of an attempted distraction into "cruft" or a fossil fuel analogy so I give no apology to Drinkypoo or anyone else for taking him to task for his deliberate evasion of the issue. With some people being polite is unfortunately taken as agreement.
But instead more like "X is made of lots of clunky little bits - let's make something monolithic instead". As the Wayland project has progressed it's become more functional but to do that it's become less monolithic and to actually work it has had to take on the characteristics that the loudest fanboys have dismissed as being flaws of X.
I hope it succeeds but I'm sick of the clamour of "X sux" clueless fanboys drowning out any information of substance.
My point is that some stuff in X, most notably the remote stuff, is seen as utterly beneath Wayland's notice at this point with no plan to implement such features.
Your suggestions of workarounds, viable or not, doesn't change that.
Did I state that clearly enough this time without the complication of an example to argue over?