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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.
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'
You are aware of that Ubuntu has the same thing, right? On 12.04 and older you can install it from the alternate CD installer, just select to do a minimal install at the boot screen. Later releases moved it to the server CD install but the result should be the same. It basically installs the ubuntu-minimal meta package and nothing else.
Hurd vs Linux ? Awesome! Not..
At the moment this is looking more like Hurd vs Plan 9. Neither wayland nor Mir have mass appeal or momentum.
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
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.
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.
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.
You're of course technically correct, as long as you run a plain X application. Which is xterm and.... what? Nothing that uses KDE, Gnome, wxWidgets or any other form of toolkit from the last 15 years at least. If you talk about remoting anything that actually looks like a GUI there's a 99.99% chance it won't be network transparent, but if you cover your ears and chant "xterm" real loud you can ignore that. And if xterm is all you need you might as well use plain SSH, it's basically SSH with a server drawn border instead of a client drawn one.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What makes the commercial Unix's better for heavy iron back use? (That's a genuine question, not a challenge.) I understand that earlier versions of the Linux kernel didn't do multi-threading in an efficient way - too much locking, and they lacked asynchronous IO and a few other similar technologies that made them inefficient for huge multi-threaded tasks. But my understand is that these days, it can keep up with just about anything for efficiency and stability.
Most of the supercomputers in the world are built using Linux. Are you saying that Linux is used in those machines strictly because of commercial Unix licensing costs?