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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.

5 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Not Invented Here by headkase · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the main issue Canonical has with Wayland and X is that they are Not Invented Here. Canonical has their own priorities and regardless of the technical merits vs. Wayland and others Canonical wants to be in control of the display server so they can lead it to their interests and not have to convince other parties to go their way.

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    Shh.
    1. Re:Not Invented Here by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 5, Funny

      Pretty much. "Mouthpiece for Canonical: Canonical-made System Better than Stupid Other System."

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      Support my political activism on Patreon.
  2. 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?

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    I write sci-fi for metalheads

  3. Re:Why? by 0123456 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's wrong with X?

    Fixing old code that mostly works is boring. Must Have New Shiny!

  4. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The things X does well (e.g. network transparency) are really irrelevant nowadays (you can just send video instead of a render command stream, it will be better) while it's underlying design makes many things we want now (e.g. smooth UI, hotplug display devices without spending 3 hours maintaining Xorg config, composited rendering, works on limited hardware) unnecessarily difficult and complicated, which encourages the proliferation of X extensions (XRandR, AIGLX), hurts the performance of the display stack, and actually break the one thing X does well (network transparency was dropped sometime around when they added Direct Rendering Manager to try and fix the X performance issues).