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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."
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.
Except that most people don't use X network transparency. You can achieve the same effect without it, and this is what most people do, but they don't even know it. They see a remote client and immediately think "it must be network transparency!" If that were the case then surely windows is network transparent since it supports remote desktop.
As I said, network transparency is the mating call of the X noob.
Yes, it is a flamebait-ish statement, but it also happens to be the truth.
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.