Canonical Ports Chromium To The Mir Display Server

An anonymous reader writes "Months after Intel ported the Chromium open-source web browser to Wayland, Chromium is now running on Ubuntu's Mir. The Mir display server port ended up being based on Wayland's Chromium code for interfacing with Google's Ozone abstraction framework. The Ubuntu developer responsible for this work makes claims that they will be trying to better collaborate with Wayland developers over this code." Grab the code hot off the press.

Comments

Shuttleworth is a lunatic.

[Zeio]

I remember at openstack portland Shuttleworth gave a live demo that failed. Ubuntu fails constantly. While Redhat tries to normalize the high rates of change in Linux, Ubuntu injects massive changes all the time while providing no stability. I have many years now working with a development team where we use Ubuntu as both product appliance and infrastructure. I have never seen a bigger mess than the trash that gets pumped out by Canonical. I used to know many Ubuntu acolytes who are converting away. Shuttleworth has spent a LOT of political capital and his promises are empty. I really dislike Canonical, I dislike Ubuntu, and I really dislike this arrogant loser Shuttleworth. Bad packages, kabi and abi changes. A preseed/install system that is pathetic, instability, bleeding edge, bad stable kernel management, horrible backporting fixes, unstable userland.

Im done with Canonical and Shuttleworth.

Re:Shuttleworth is a lunatic.

[JoeMerchant]

So, don't hold back, tell us how you really feel....

What's your idea of an easy migration path out of Ubuntu, preferably something still Debian based, but really, anything that serves the ideals that Ubuntu used to address 6 to 10 years ago and has gotten away from?

I see lots of hard-core Arch users around, has anybody made something like "Stable KDE on Arch" into a supported distro yet?

Re:Shuttleworth is a lunatic.

[zodmaner5810]

Just use Debian, seriously. I'm running KDE 4.11.5 on Debian Sid for about a year now, and it has been a very pleseant experience. Also, Sid works more or less like a rolling release distro, so you will constantly get the latest version of the softwares you use. It's not as fast or as bleeding edge as some distros, but it's more way, way, _way_ more stable. For example, Sid gets the latest version of Firefox about a week after the official release, sometimes sooner than that. PS. I'm an ex-Arch users, having switched away from Arch due to many reasons, and couldn't be happier.

Re:Shuttleworth is a lunatic.

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment is a fabrication, I was working on the demo for OpenStack Portland and it worked just fine. The rest of your post is just a rant with no technical details in it whatsoever.

Re:Shuttleworth is a lunatic.

[Anonymous Coward]

I really love Ubuntu. Everything Just Works, TM. You just download it, usage and installation is a breeze. Hardware compatibility is off the charts, even compared with Windows. The amount of online information if you run into problems is amazing, as well. I don't pay Ubuntu for support, yet each problem I've encountered is already documented somewhere and a workaround/fix available. The usability is on par or better that Windows, and close to Mac. All programs that have Linux versions come neatly prepackaged for Ubuntu.

I get why purists hate it, because it takes away the nice hours and days of tinkering for something to work. Yep, it's not as customizable in the sense that is difficult to change something and get it to work better. But if you want get something done WITH computers and not FOR computers, it's amazing.

AC for corporate reasons.

Re:Shuttleworth is a lunatic.

[squiggleslash]

X11 is the technically superior choice. #getoffmylawn

Still, from that point of view, the Mir thing has been a success for all those itching to replace a stable, mature, well known and tested, versatile, and powerful windowing system with a new and untested stripped down windowing system simply because they don't understand why someone would want some of the features X11 has, and are under the impression it's bloated because it's bigger than Windows 2.0 was in 1989.

Mir has helped create the illusion the decision has been made already. We are transitioning, no more debate is needed (or will be accepted) as to whether we should, and the question is what we should transition to.

Much the same mistake was made with GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, a transition that Ubuntu helped along in the same way with Unity. Users rebelled, with forks like Mint attempting to roll back the damage, but the end result was a deterioration in the perception of GNU/Linux as a potential replacement for Windows. Distributions based upon GNOME 3 and Unity got the "slick", "professional", treatment, with users finding fast that it wasn't what they actually wanted. The GNOME 2 hold-outs didn't have the resources to ensure GNOME 2's forks had the same level of support, and so ended up with systems that looked to new users dated and ugly.

We will see the same with Mir/Wayland, except worse. We'll have five to ten years of having to deal with an immature windowing system that, by the end of the process, has just as many hacks and quirks as X11 but will almost certainly still lack key features X11 offers. X11 holdouts will find themselves using an increasingly unreliable and unstable platform as newer hardware requires new device drivers, without the level of support needed within the X.org X11 community to support them.

We're all going to lose. The best free software users can hope for now is that Google continues to extend Android to eventually offer a decent desktop experience. I don't know why they would, perhaps to replace ChromeOS, but at least you're looking at something mature there. But that's not here now, and the next five years will be rough for GNU/Linux users. We'll likely be as mainstream as FreeBSD by the end of it.

Mir?

[slapout]

I thought Mir crashed long ago

Re:Mir?

[bluefoxlucid]

Pretty much. In this case, it's doubtful Wayland is at critical bodies and so adding the programming resources from Mir onto Wayland would produce a product with better quality and a richer feature set in a shorter time. That's how you make projects successful; in this case, of course, projects have a much more flexible budget of "anyone who has time and desire"--with the double-edge that budgeted resources aren't assigned by a higher power, but rather volunteered.

Canonical has volunteers in a pool which are budgeted across multiple projects, and so budgeting these resources to take advantage of an existing project's resources gives more ROI than building and maintaining their own. This is more traditional budgeting, and means that Canonical actually has decision making power over budgets: they don't just start doing something and hope people join in, but rather they influence how resources they already possess are spent. In this case it's not entirely traditional: many resources are volunteer, and there is a probability that more volunteers will appear or some will leave; but they do have some influence to direct resources at efforts.

They are using that influence inefficiently. It's the same as if a person decided to get a car, and so bought metal and fuel and made fire and machined all the parts for a $30,000 Ford Mustang, spending $350,000 in the process. They may say: "I wanted a larger engine". They may say many things. In the end, however, if their explanation is rational and utility--if it is that a Ford Mustang is lacking in some way, rather than that they would like the experience of building such a thing or that they just "want to"--then the judgment of their decision stems from three objective assessments. The first: is the Ford Mustang essentially lacking in that way? The second: Is this important? And the final: Can we more effectively correct this deficiency in any other way--by finding a better car, by modifying a Ford Mustang, or by convincing Ford to change next year's model?

There are two criticisms here. Canonical asserts that Wayland is inadequate, hence Mir; criticism comes in the form that it would be more efficient and effective for Canonical to devote the resources spent on Mir instead to improve Wayland. The second: we assume Canonical behaves in an irrational manner or to other rational considerations (such as vendor lock-in to Mir, some future ability to implement DRM, etc.), which we criticize directly.

Re:Posting to undo bad mod.

[oodaloop]

Does posting AC undo bad mods?

Re:I haven't watched the video

[Chrisq]

but from the still image the guy looks like a monkey

he's a code monkey!

Wait, what?

[jones_supa]

My logic says that the toolkit that Chrome uses should be ported to have a Mir backend, rather than Chromium itself? I guess Google uses so much in-house stuff that it makes this necessary.

Not that I would be interested in Ubuntu anyway. The Unity desktop is laggy and, I'm not a big fan of having a custom display server (Mir) instead of the widely-adopted Wayland.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the serious distros use Wayland yet. I would not call it widely-adopted.

Shuttleworth is the reason many use Linux Desktop

[kervin]

Hate him all you want. But when I looked around for a Workstation preinstalled with Linux, Ubuntu was the only serious choice I got. Redhat didn't even have a preinstalled system they would sell me. That's right, they haven't even paid enough attention to Linux Desktop to have a partner provide a well-spec'ed, modern, supported Linux laptop.

After a lot of digging I found a list of Windows laptops Redhat swore would also run their OS. But asking users to buy one OS ( Windows ) and reinstall another is an automatic fail for the vast majority of desktop buyers. Not that I can't do install an OS, but not having a supported OS is just not worth my time anymore. I'm no longer in college with lots of time to tweak and troubleshoot.

I wish I could go to Redhat.com, enter my credit card and have a partner laptop shipped to me in a few weeks. Complete with modern specs and OS support direct from Redhat. But that's not possible even if I'd happily pay a premium. At least Ubuntu has System76.