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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."
Much better performance, no tearing problems, smooth compositing and desktop effects, old legacy X11 crap thrown away.
Which is of course why X gets used where it is used in the first place. Wrap your head around X being used on MS Windows guys - once you work out why it is used there you'll stop laughing at network transparency and see why people are using it.
X is only network transparent if all your apps are from 1995 and are written against Motif. Everything newer than that is not network transparent, it's just shoving uncompressed bitmaps across the network in a highly inefficient wrapper protocol that makes large numbers of inefficient, lag inducing round-trips.
A rootless VNC-esque protocol (Xpra) is a superior solution in every way.
If you think that he's wrong maybe you should look at how any modern X system works. Both X developers and Wayland developers have discussed in detail that there is nothing network transparent about any modern release of X which does any kind of direct rendering or hardware acceleration, something that was introduced around the mid 90s, so the parent's comment is actually right on the mark.
Wayland is a simple abstract layer. You can make your own remote protocol and have receive your draw commands and render it locally. One can fully implement X in Wayland, but one cannot implement Wayland in X. Therefore, Wayland is better. If you need X like functionality, someone could easily create a wrapper, which they already have for X.