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Ubuntu's Mir Gets Delayed Again
jones_supa writes "Delays keep piling up for the Mir display server on the Ubuntu desktop. After already being postponed multiple times, Mir might not be enabled by default on the Ubuntu Linux desktop until the 16.04 LTS release — in two years time! This was the estimate by Mark Shuttleworth in a virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit. Using Mir, Mark says, will lead to supporting more hardware, obtaining better performance, and 'do some great things' with the technology. He expects some users will start using Mir on the desktop over the next year. Mir is already packaged as an experimental option, along with an experimental Unity 8 desktop session."
If Wayland is able to make decent ground before Mir is ready, there's still hope Ubuntu will drop the whole thing.
So, stop slacking, Mir and Wayland!
It's simple. Install Debian Minimal and build your system up to what you want it to be.
Want a desktop or several desktops to switch between?
Your choice
Want a window manager or several of them to switch between?
Your choice
It's all your choice.
Show me why I should choose any flavor of Ubuntu when I can use Debian Minimal Install and create my own experiences?
not wait "until" 16.04, by 16.04 we should definitely be on Mir.. The same way by 16.04 we plan to be on systemd. But much of the switch will happen in 14.10, some more in 15.04, etc....
You are what you eat
It's already default on the tablet and phone, which is what Shuttleworth is excited about these days. So in that sense, it is already here.
So wayland is going to have to do a lot more than make decent ground if Ubuntu is to drop Mir. Wayland will need to do everything that Mir and X11 can do, and exceed them, and also be on a mature and well tested code base. Merely being an adequate competitor won't cut it.
I've found (as a rule of thumb) that, when asking a grad student "How much time do you think you have left before you can write up your thesis?", if the answer is two or more years out then it really means "I don't know." The student honestly believes this answer, but in reality he/she doesn't know how much he/she doesn't know.
I'm starting to feel about the same with Mir and Canonical here. Shuttleworth is the tenured but aloof professor who casually coaxes his students (employees) toward completing milestones but without too much urgency. Money's not plentiful, but the professor has enough contacts and contracts to keep his lab going and give a stipend to his students. They put out a few papers (releases) each year, and each time the students think this grand project is "almost done"... only to discover that there's still more left to do.
There's tremendous value in this kind of exploratory research. I'm just not sure it makes sense to package it up for end users.
If I were Mark Shuttleworth's technical advisor, I'd suggest examining RedHat's Fedora model. Create a small group called Canonical Labs where stuff like Mir and Unity can flourish, with continuous releases and without the artificial constraint of a set release date. (If this makes the environment too lackadaisical and development isn't progressing fast enough, find some other way to instill discipline and/or motivation; don't make it the threat of moving alpha code to end-users.) When it's stabilized (no longer shuffling menus and window icons around, for example), then integrate it with the main Ubuntu branch. Something a bit more edgy and up-to-date than Debian Stable or RHEL, but not so much that it constantly upends your users.
Is she hot?
Delays just mean they're working on perfecting and producing the best of what they're trying to develop, and that once released it'll be a crowning moment of awesome as a consequence of the delays. Just like Duke Nukem Forever.
Account abandoned. I can't fucking spell for shit and Slashdot doesn't even allow time-limited edits of posts. Plus you'
Hurd vs Linux ? Awesome! Not..
This Mir/Weyland/X debate is NOT another KDE v.s. Gnome or Emacs v.s. VI. In those debates every user is able to choose what they prefer.
The display server choice is made by the software writer, not the end user. If the end user wants to use a particular piece of software, they will have to use the display server that the software requires. There is no choice.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
You are really calling the people who have been using X for years "noobs"? How interesting and childish. You've also shown you did not understand my bit on X windows on MS Windows yet replied with an opinion anyway. Since wikipedia exist you have no excuse for such a thing.
Is she hot?
Marrying Windows 8 precludes the need of an answer ... .
Mir is half a meerkat that turns into vapour at full moon.
Yeah, really, why limit it to commercial version of Unix that suck. I haven't seen any that doesn't suck.
And on topic, so this new server is buggier than the current xerver? How can that be, the current version has to be one of the buggiest pieces of distributed code I have ever seen.
People moved in hordes to RDP as a protocol because X sucks so bad on a LAN. But the desktop will not run on RDP, unless you switch to XFCE. Is it just me, or does XFCE look like something from the 50s?
With all the talk about open source responsiveness to fixing issues, this is state of the art.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
"There's no modern distro which actually implements remote X in any other way than Wayland is proposing to do it, pixels scraping and sending it over the network."
Utter utter utter crap. If you open a standard X app - eg xterm - on a remote server it will use the standard X protocol, it will NOT do remote desktop style pixel scraping. If you don't believe me check it out with tcpdump.
"Yet for some reason some people are still hung up on a feature which they think they use because frankly they don't understand anything"
As you're proving - its the ones who make the biggest noises who usually understand the least.
And people wonder why inbreeding is bad?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
is ridiculous. Listen... Arguing on the Internet is like running in the special olympics -- even if you win, you're still retarded.
So says the fool putting himself up as an "expert" that has never heard of X windows being used on MS Windows. A large chunk of the engineering, design, SFX and geophysical sectors run the way and linux made it's way onto the engineering office workstation mostly to replace MS Windows machines mainly running X.
How did you manage to not notice anything as major as that when you were become enough of an expert to shout us all down?
What motivates such fanboys to be so aggressive about a topic that they know so little about and should care so little about?
So get off my lawn!
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
"Mir is already packaged as an experimental option, along with an experimental Unity 8 desktop session." Good God. The Ubuntu desktop always has been and always will be an experimental mess. I can't ever remember being more scared to reboot my workstation after a kernel update with the likely possibility of having restore my video driver and settings. My old 386 with 4 (!) mb ram, running twm has less issues.
Fuck Ajit Pai
It came up in an interview and was not seen as a big deal because it was linux only by design and not about "bending over backwards for fringe platforms".
https://archive.fosdem.org/201...
Then the developer pool expanded and the design changed - and FYI, policy went from "no compositor but Weston" to "reference compositor". The monolithic design was supposed to be a major feature initially, everyone was supposed to use Weston if they wanted to use Wayland at all. The project is improving, IMHO partly because they now have to be better than what Mir says it's going to be.
It's an example of progress. I really don't get why there is so much hate being spread around here that I can't even point out something good about Wayland without people insisting that I should be saying it started as perfect.