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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.
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?
Version numbers don't mean a whole lot. Google Chrome hasn't changed much in 33 versions.
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.
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
Is she hot?
Marrying Windows 8 precludes the need of an answer ... .
Absolutely. I've been using a car for twenty years that doesn't make me an expert mechanic. It's funny that simply because you open a windows manager or write a few function calls for X you consider yourself an expert. on it.
The people who do know the X innards inside and out, namely X.org, says it sucks and are writing Wayland.i
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.
You are really calling the people who have been using X for years "noobs"?
Using X does not mean understanding X. Additionally using X does not mean understanding how things have changed under the hood when there's been no visible change in the usability of the system.
Frankly a lot of X veterans who maybe once used X in a truly network transparent way think that just because their ability to send a window to another X system means it's still network transparent, which is utter rubbish. 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.
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, and the most vocal bunch seems to be the ones with the longest beards.
Presumably if you're arguing on slashdot its because you've got quite a long beard yourself.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
"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
With respect I suggest you look into the subject so you understand enough as to why I am calling out the above fool for the idiot that he is.
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
Not so much pixel scraping but pixel pushing. Most apps render themselves into a pixmap and push it around the network. They're not using X primitives. They *might* be using XRender primitives or they might not. It's still a large amount of data, and combined with the synchronous nature of X, it's horribly inefficient. A remoting enabled compositor for Wayland could probably work better than X, even for the one thing that people always go on about X being good for.
Yeah, I tend to look at Chrome's version numbers as Chrome 1.xx. So we're currently at Chrome 1.33. When you realize that, the rapid release schedule make a lot more sense. Google just never plans to increment the true major version number, so they just drop it.
It's the same with Firefox. It's true major version number is around 7.0, but it's really not far removed to just say that everything after Firefox 3.6 is part of Firefox 4.0, meaning we're on Firefox 4.27 now.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
You are really calling the people who have been using X for years "noobs"?
Using X does not mean understanding X. Additionally using X does not mean understanding how things have changed under the hood when there's been no visible change in the usability of the system.
Nobody complains about changes under the hood if there are no regressions. Don't beat up a stawman.
Frankly a lot of X veterans who maybe once used X in a truly network transparent way think that just because their ability to send a window to another X system means it's still network transparent, which is utter rubbish.
I would say this is exactly what network transparency means. That there are optimizations for local clients does not change this a bit. Similar optimizations have been there forever (MIT SHM).
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.
Well, the design of Wayland is actually not so much different than X. (Still people claim it will magically be much more performant.)
The problem with Wayland is: It breaks compatibility with X without having any real advantage.
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, and the most vocal bunch seems to be the ones with the longest beards.
And the insults don't help your case. You don't have to grow a beard, but a bit of maturity would be nice.
"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
And has been stuck at 11.x.y.z for the 27 after that...
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
You are the noob if you think pixel scraping is involved. I'll repeat my challenge. If Wayland over the network is so easily done, why not do it and silence about 75% of the critics?
And if I had a pegasus I could ride to work in style. Much as my garage seems devoid of pegasi, Wayland seems devoid of remoting enabled compositors.
Nobody complains about changes under the hood if there are no regressions. Don't beat up a stawman.
/
Regressions are only existent because of the early stages of development compositors are in. As the developers have mentioned over and over again to their finger in eared critics, there's nothing preventing remote applications, and indeed Weston was shown to have some alpha RDP style code in it. Unless you're complaining about the fact that Wayland won't do everything under the sun like X tried to do in which case yes that's a regression, but not one that I would complain about.
I would say this is exactly what network transparency means. That there are optimizations for local clients does not change this a bit. Similar optimizations have been there forever (MIT SHM).
No. Just no. The ability to remotely display an app does not make it network transparent. If that's what you think then you should be happy that Wayland will allow the exact same "network transparency" you so hold dear. Network transparency means the app renders in the exact same way regardless of the target, which is just plain false. You call different ways of rendering "optimizations" I call them no longer being network transparent, which is what the Wayland people also mean when they say the protocol isn't network transparent.
Well, the design of Wayland is actually not so much different than X. (Still people claim it will magically be much more performant.)
The problem with Wayland is: It breaks compatibility with X without having any real advantage.
There are plenty of advantages. Currently developers have to implement some insane workarounds to cover some basic use cases of a modern OS. For example, in Linux currently you are unable to use media buttons while the display is locked or the screen saver is on, unless the screen saver is written in a way specific to capture the inputs and pass them up the chain. I.e. with Linux on my laptop I actually need to type in my password to skip to the next song despite the fact I have buttons placed at the front of my laptop which I can use without even opening the screen. It's this kind of crap that holding the system back from common use. Things don't "just work". Things need working around.
And the insults don't help your case. You don't have to grow a beard, but a bit of maturity would be nice.
Did not mean to insult. Just trying (and failing) to be clever. But in plain english, the people who are most vocally against Wayland appear to be either people jumping on bandwagons with no clue, or people who have been long time users of Linux who live and breath command lines and remote desktop sessions, who don't understand how much things have changed under the hood despite the fact they can still use the system the same way they always have. A classic example is one of the replies above saying xterm is truly network transparent. Yes it is, it's not the default terminal in any flavour of Linux except for maybe Arch.
People are stuck in their ways and are worried their world will be turned upside down. What I don't understand the most about this is that this is Linux. Don't like Wayland? Don't use it!.
Weston supports RDP in about 1000 lines of code hooked up to FreeRDP. So yes it does remoting and any other compositor can do it too.
You're a noob if you don't. Wayland and networking has been done. There was even a slashdot article about it. The critics are just bitching and moaning that the functionality is not defined in the protocol. Well not shit, defining every little thing turned X into the clusterfuck it is today. There's nothing in Wayland that prevents network display of applications.
Does it work such that I may ssh to the remote machine somewhere, run a Wayland app on the command line and have it's window appear on my desktop?
Does that give me the app window integrated into my local desktop or does it give me the lame extra desktop in a window experience?
As the developers have mentioned over and over again to their finger in eared critics, there's nothing preventing remote applications, and indeed Weston was shown to have some alpha RDP style code in it.
I would not complain if the Wayland people would just shut up and work on their stuff and once everything is ready *propose* it as an alternative... Instead of declaring it as the future replacement long before even basic functionality it is ready (and I am not talking about network transparency).
I also don't care what kind of RDP stuff the can possible build into Wayland. I need *compatibility*. The huge advantage of X is that is a standard with a huge number of apps, and a protocol which is currently spoken by every Linux and UNIX machine. A switch to Wayland (or MIR) will damage this ecosystem. Linux/Wayland will be different to Linux/X similar to how Android is different. Breaking API compatiblity on the Linux desktop is just insanely stupid. And this is exactly what Wayland is about.
I would say this is exactly what network transparency means. That there are optimizations for local clients does not change this a bit. Similar optimizations have been there forever (MIT SHM).
No. Just no. The ability to remotely display an app does not make it network transparent. If that's what you think then you should be happy that Wayland will allow the exact same "network transparency" you so hold dear.
Network transparency means the app renders in the exact same way regardless of the target, which is just plain false.
Please define "exact same way". Currently, almost all applications (not just xterm, also all others: I commonly use: eog, gnome-terminal, nautilus, evince, gitk....) work just fine over the network. And as far as I see they render in exactly same way (using the X render extension). So please clarify what you mean by "not network transparent". Are you talking about OpenGL applications? Those would render differently (GLX for remote and direct rendering locally), but I think this is handled transparently to the application by the mesa library.
...media buttons...
The media buttons seems the only real argument that comes up. But it is hard to believe that you have to throw out a decade of API compatibility to fix this minor issue. The way that Wayland seems to fix this is to have special support for screen savers. Certainly, one could have a special functonality in X as well.
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.