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Lead Mir Developer: 'Mir More Relevant Than Wayland In Two Years'

Posted by Soulskill on from the display-battle-brewing dept.

M-Saunders writes Canonical courted plenty of controversy with it announced Mir, its home-grown display server. But why did the company choose to go it alone, and not collaborate with the Wayland project? Linux Voice has an interview with Thomas Voss, Mir's lead developer. Voss explains how Mir came into being, what it offers, and why he believes it will outlast Wayland.

4 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. I still don't see what's wrong with X by Lilith's+Heart-shape · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Seriously, what's so broken about X? Is it just a pain in the ass for developers to work with?

    --

    I write sci-fi for metalheads

    1. Re:I still don't see what's wrong with X by 0123456 · · Score: 1, Interesting

      X was great for its time. But its time was when graphics hardware was slow and software was relatively undemanding.

      Ha-ha-ha... you clearly never used an X-Terminal back when we were all going to have dumb terminals on our desks talking to The Cloud... sorry... super-powerful 68020-based Unix servers The X overhead is miniscule today, unless you're trying to push X sessions over the Internet, or video over the LAN.

    2. Re:I still don't see what's wrong with X by N7DR · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Seriously, what's so broken about X? Is it just a pain in the ass for developers to work with?

      I taught myself X from scratch last year. I didn't find it hard at all. In fact, I found it a whole lot easier than either of the fancy modern GUI toolkits that I looked at first and tried to use to implement the project I was working on.

      Out of desperation born of lack of progress over an extended period, I thought I'd take a look at X. And suddenly it became easy to get the interface to behave *exactly* the way I wanted instead in somebody else's idea of what I should want.

      And the documentation was complete, correct, and easy to follow. I didn't have to keep asking people for help (often, with no resolution). In a word, both the documentation and the code for X are mature. Which I submit beats bleeding edge every time if you're trying to build something robust.

  2. Quite by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wish I had mod points. Canonical arn't really interested in Linux or unix in general other than how it can ultimately make them money. Its a means to an end and if that means dropping 30 years of experience because it doesn't quite suit them then they will.

    X is far from perfect but its the unix display standard and it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. If canonical want to go their own way then they'll find their user base dropping away even further.