Making significant headway with Mir, it probably won't be long till Red Hat hires this Canonical developer out from under them to put a kibosh on the project.
Significant headway? This is just X11 and Mir side by side using XMir. Something like this is possible with Wayland since at least a year, maybe even since 2011. For proof of running X11 applications under Wayland via XWayland see the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/waylandweston/videos
Is there going to be an X12? Some of the main X11 devs are working on Wayland. Have any thought about doing an X12?
X12 just was a tentative name for some imaginary future replacement. Even though there were some X12 ideas docs in the past, the reality is that Wayland the the de facto X12.
I appreciate the fact that Ubuntu has made dealing with video drivers easy, and I imagine working with Valve has given them some insight to what they think is needed.
Mandriva added easy driver installation to Linux way before Ubuntu's Jockey even existed. Canonical also does not develop drivers, therefore I don't get how you think it matters what Canonoical may know what's needed. So far the FOSS drivers were developed by AMD (radeon), Intel, Google (Gallium-based Intel drivers), SUSE (radeonhd), and Red Hat (nouveau, radeon, and more). Canonical never ever even touched GPU driver code.
Canonical still owns Lubuntu & Xubuntu, but Kubuntu has been handed over to Blue Systems.
Blue Systems pay for Kubuntu but the Kubuntu trademark is owned by Canonical. Blue Systems have their own Linux distribution called Netrunner which, for the time being, is based on Kubuntu.
You've got quite a selective memory there, bud. The only parties that are hurling Molotov's are in the Wayland and KDE camps (mostly from the deranged kwin dev).
He's talking BS. Martin Graesslin, the KWin maintainer, began to prepare KWin for Wayland before Mir was even announced. So he designed the transition path to support two and only two back ends. See https://plus.google.com/115606635748721265446/posts/136nV4uojKH for details (public post, no need for a G+ account).
Graesslin also made it repeatedly clear that he won't support single-distro solutions. That means no support for MS Windows in KWin, OSX' Quartz, or Android's SurfaceFlinger. Somehow nobody ever had a problem with that decision. Only after Canonocal announced Mir Ubuntu fanboys began to whine.
Sure, sure, the recent 100% CPU load on screenlocking bug on KDE 4.10.x for some people was really fun, I suppose.
No idea what you're talking about. I tried googling it but found nothing.
I have no idea what kind of "crucial for productivity" you need to update that often from the damn desktop/environment/.
I was referring to PIM applications. If you could read, you'd knew that.
As for the PIM if you value your crucial thing - just don't use KDE PIM period. It's just that bad.
Kontact 4.10 is great: http://www.muktware.com/5567/future-and-kde-pim – 4.8 however was only the second release with the new foundation. It contained bugs related to mail filtering. These bugs are all fixed in 4.9.x or 4.10.x, as far as I'm aware.
Evolution 3.6 also bought nice improvements.
As for non-PIM productivity applications: GNOME Boxes 3.4 is a mere tech preview. 3.8 is the current and much better release. GNOME Web is now based on WebKit2 which is a great improvement security-wise. As I previously wrote: QtWebKit 2.3 has also been released with many important bug fixes but Debian 7.0 sticks blindly to QtWebKit 2.2. EVERY Qt-based application that uses WebKit to render some content has grave security risks with 2.2.
1. Always new, only new. Welcome your new bugs every so often by impaling yourself on them (no idea how that works, really).
2. Might be not latest but you don't need to fix random bugs out of nowhere. If there were bugs you deal with them once and forget about it until next release.
Second one is Debian stable. It might not have appeal to you, but it does for many of us who don't feel like fixing random upstream bugs _all the time_. And those DEs, they sure as hell do have those.
As if you would fix any bugs...
GNOME 3.4, KDE SC 4.8, and Xfce 4.8 are End Of Life and don't receive any bugfixes at all any longer and all those releases fixed more bugs than they introduced regressions. Dot-0 releases are the ones with regressions and these are gone by dot-1.
Claiming that the fixed bugs are not important is simply denying reality. Especially in KDE land where 4.7 introduced the new generation KMail and 4.8 is only the second release with it. 4.9 and 4.10 fixed loads and loads of bugs in that area and PIM is not some unimportant game or so -- it's crucial for productivity.
And webkit is explicitly cited in the wheezy release notes as something that is not covered by their security guarantees. The only webkit browser that receives security attention is chromium; if you want to use some other webkit browser, you do so at your own risk. This is a reasonable stance to take for an organization with limited resources, particularly considering how niche the affected browsers are.
QtWebKit is not a single browser, it's the HTML rendering used by almost all KDE applications (excl. the few that still use KHTML). And I don't see any reason in refusing to ship an important bugfix release that does not need any cherrypicked backporting. It simply proves that Debian is not as secure as masternerdguy claimed. Considering that QtWebKit 2.2 is the version Debian users are stuck now for the next two years without any update in sight, Debian can be considered extremely dangerous.
Debian stable focuses in being a bugfree distribution, not a distribution comprised only of bugfree software.
That's not what masternerdguy wrote.
if you campare it to, say, Fedora 17's or even Kubuntu 12.04's KDE 4.8, you'll realize how marvelously quirkless Debian's KDE is and why it pays to have stabler distributions.
And when you look at openSUSE, your whole argument falls apart: openSUSE is also relatively conservative but still manages to bring recent GNOME, KDE SC, and Xfce releases to its users. That's because the openSUSE maintainers decide on a case by case basis (eg. they waited a while to adopt systemd or Plymouth) instead of blindly picking only old software.
Debian places a strong emphasis on stability compared to most distros. Instead of being on the bleeding edge they are conservative and try to provide a stable, bug free, and secure system
That generalized claim is wrong. Three prominent examples:
The KDE Workspaces/Apps releases 4.8.4 are less stable than 4.10.2. The 4.8.x releases as well as 4.9.x reached End Of Life quite some time ago and don't receive any bugfix any longer. 4.10.2 contains many bugfixes upstream doesn't bother backporting to older releases (at least not 4.8.x which is two versions behind).
Same with GNOME. I could understand if the package maintainers decided to use 3.6 instead of 3.8 because 3.6 still includes the Fallback Mode but 3.4 is old and unmaintained.
Xfce 4.10 is already a year old and 4.12 should be around the corner. 4.8 just unmaintained and lacks many crucial bugfixes from 4.10.
Not being cutting edge means not blindly jumping towards the latest dot-0 release. It means sticking to software with long term support (eg. Mozilla's ESR versions which regularly receive bugfixes). However skipping releases that contain many bugfixes just for the sake of shipping >1 year old software has nothing to do with providing stability or security. On the contrary.
Bruce Schneier doesn't need to hide data with steganography - data hides from Bruce Schneier Bruce Schneier knows who the Anonymous Coward is Bruce Schneier can recite pi. Backwards. Bruce Schneier can securely wipe any hard drive by shaking it like an etch-a-sketch. Bruce Schneier knows Chuck Norris' private key. Bruce Schneier can write a recursive program that proves the Riemann Hypothesis. In Malbolge. Bruce Schneier can read captchas. Hashes collide because they're swerving to avoid Bruce Schneier. Bruce Schneier is the root of all certificates. Bruce Schneier intercepts all your internal monologues by a man-in-the-middle attack.
I agree that the Phoronix benchmarks are mostly stupid but the site also covers lots of stories other publications don't. Michael reads through git commit logs, has subscriptions to mailing lists of exotic Linux-related projects, etc. and he reports what he finds.
Filtering out the benchmark stories is still easier than to subscribe to all those mailing lists and search for useful info.
AMD releases hardware documentation but I have heard that especially for newer hardware it is not really complete
Due financial troubles, AMD had to fire many people, incl the majority of its Linux developers. Maybe that's why the docs are incomplete...
AMD allegedly has some code for the open source driver for power management and other stuff ready but they have always problems with legal review so they can't release it.
The Mesa wiki claims full power management support for almost all AMD GPUs. Can't verify that, though, as I'm currently on NVidia.
No shit. Fact is, Nvidia, with their closed-source binary-blob driver, STILL supports Linux better than ATI/AMD did/does. "Purity" is overrated, and variable, depending on who's doing defining it.
"Purity" means that the drivers work out of the box under all Linux distributions. The proprietary drivers must be re-installed every time a kernel upgrade is done which, depending on the Linux distribution, can be quite often.
Microsoft is probably just syncing its DirectX development cycle to the Xbox development cycle. So some time before the Xbox 4 MS will develop and release DirectX 12.
Yeah that was pretty cool. You could even adjust the level of fuzziness. I loved setting it high and have it tell me "late afternoon" or at the highest level "the middle of the week".
You can still do that. This clock just became a separate applet since the introduction of Plasma Desktop. It's in the plasma-addons package.
Can you recite specific cases? The situation with KHTML was when two different development models clash.
Apple's development model at that time was behind closed doors and doing that is not good FOSS citizenship. Another example is Apple Public Source License 1.0.
Apple has contributed to and still contributes to many open source project today. LLVM, OpenCL, Darwin, cups, Bonjour/ZeroConf, etc.
Yes, today. I was referring to Apple's initial steps into FOSS development. Apple dropped source code under APSL unless it had no choice. Today even Apple's own developments such as Bonjour or Dispatch are released under Apache License or BSD-like licenses and other parties can easily pick them up. Apple successfully set up WebKit as vendor-neutral project, joined LLVM and contributed Clang, even became the release manager of X.org at some point, etc.
Google should have learned from Apple's past mistakes. Yet, Google somehow successfully presents itself as great FOSS citizen, despite: The Android kernel was as much of a "uncivil" fork of Linux as WebKit was from KHTML and it took much campaigning by Greg KH and others to get Google to even start to submit and maintain the patches upstream. Google refused to implement a multi-process architecture directly in WebKit and insisted to make it Chrome-exclusive. Same with V8: No attempt to even try to optimize WebKit's JavaScriptCore, instead insisting on adding hard to maintain bindings for V8.
Slashdot Mirror
Making significant headway with Mir, it probably won't be long till Red Hat hires this Canonical developer out from under them to put a kibosh on the project.
Significant headway? This is just X11 and Mir side by side using XMir. Something like this is possible with Wayland since at least a year, maybe even since 2011. For proof of running X11 applications under Wayland via XWayland see the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/waylandweston/videos
Is there going to be an X12? Some of the main X11 devs are working on Wayland. Have any thought about doing an X12?
X12 just was a tentative name for some imaginary future replacement. Even though there were some X12 ideas docs in the past, the reality is that Wayland the the de facto X12.
I appreciate the fact that Ubuntu has made dealing with video drivers easy, and I imagine working with Valve has given them some insight to what they think is needed.
Mandriva added easy driver installation to Linux way before Ubuntu's Jockey even existed.
Canonical also does not develop drivers, therefore I don't get how you think it matters what Canonoical may know what's needed. So far the FOSS drivers were developed by AMD (radeon), Intel, Google (Gallium-based Intel drivers), SUSE (radeonhd), and Red Hat (nouveau, radeon, and more). Canonical never ever even touched GPU driver code.
Canonical still owns Lubuntu & Xubuntu, but Kubuntu has been handed over to Blue Systems.
Blue Systems pay for Kubuntu but the Kubuntu trademark is owned by Canonical.
Blue Systems have their own Linux distribution called Netrunner which, for the time being, is based on Kubuntu.
You've got quite a selective memory there, bud. The only parties that are hurling Molotov's are in the Wayland and KDE camps (mostly from the deranged kwin dev).
The mere existence of Mir is "hurling Molotovs" at Wayland: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxODA
To claim that anybody other than Canonical started that "war", is simply lying.
Brace yourselves, KDE 5 is coming!
No: http://vizzzion.org/blog/2011/06/there-is-no-kde5/
He's talking BS.
Martin Graesslin, the KWin maintainer, began to prepare KWin for Wayland before Mir was even announced. So he designed the transition path to support two and only two back ends. See https://plus.google.com/115606635748721265446/posts/136nV4uojKH for details (public post, no need for a G+ account).
Graesslin also made it repeatedly clear that he won't support single-distro solutions. That means no support for MS Windows in KWin, OSX' Quartz, or Android's SurfaceFlinger. Somehow nobody ever had a problem with that decision. Only after Canonocal announced Mir Ubuntu fanboys began to whine.
There are no technological benefits for Mir over Wayland. Canonical made false claims as outlined on http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxODA but they've since redacted the statements. Wayland even works with Android drivers: http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html
The reasons for Mir are not technological, they are purely economical. Canonical wants to establish asymmetric licensing to have an economic advantage over the competition: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html
Wayland OTOH is under MIT/X11 license for everybody. This means that not only can any Linux vendor grab it and to anything with it, incl. to make an Android version that uses Wayland: http://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/2012/09/wayland-on-android-upgrade-to-404-and.html
Mir's licensing makes it forever impossible to become part of any major BSD variant. Wayland, however, is being ported to FreeBSD: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMwMzE
Wayland is being pushed by industry giants such as Intel and Red Hat, as well as smaller companies like Collabora (creators of many technologies commonly used on GNU-based Linux such as Telepathy, WebKit-GTK, etc.: https://www.collabora.com/projects/ ).
Mir is just backed by Canonical who, while claiming to be the most popular Linux distributor, still makes no money: http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/canonical-ubuntu-linux-is-still-not-profitable.html
Sure, sure, the recent 100% CPU load on screenlocking bug on KDE 4.10.x for some people was really fun, I suppose.
No idea what you're talking about. I tried googling it but found nothing.
I have no idea what kind of "crucial for productivity" you need to update that often from the damn desktop /environment/.
I was referring to PIM applications. If you could read, you'd knew that.
As for the PIM if you value your crucial thing - just don't use KDE PIM period. It's just that bad.
Kontact 4.10 is great: http://www.muktware.com/5567/future-and-kde-pim – 4.8 however was only the second release with the new foundation. It contained bugs related to mail filtering. These bugs are all fixed in 4.9.x or 4.10.x, as far as I'm aware.
Evolution 3.6 also bought nice improvements.
As for non-PIM productivity applications: GNOME Boxes 3.4 is a mere tech preview. 3.8 is the current and much better release. GNOME Web is now based on WebKit2 which is a great improvement security-wise.
As I previously wrote: QtWebKit 2.3 has also been released with many important bug fixes but Debian 7.0 sticks blindly to QtWebKit 2.2. EVERY Qt-based application that uses WebKit to render some content has grave security risks with 2.2.
You've got a choice here.
1. Always new, only new. Welcome your new bugs every so often by impaling yourself on them (no idea how that works, really).
2. Might be not latest but you don't need to fix random bugs out of nowhere. If there were bugs you deal with them once and forget about it until next release.
Second one is Debian stable. It might not have appeal to you, but it does for many of us who don't feel like fixing random upstream bugs _all the time_. And those DEs, they sure as hell do have those.
As if you would fix any bugs...
GNOME 3.4, KDE SC 4.8, and Xfce 4.8 are End Of Life and don't receive any bugfixes at all any longer and all those releases fixed more bugs than they introduced regressions. Dot-0 releases are the ones with regressions and these are gone by dot-1.
Claiming that the fixed bugs are not important is simply denying reality. Especially in KDE land where 4.7 introduced the new generation KMail and 4.8 is only the second release with it. 4.9 and 4.10 fixed loads and loads of bugs in that area and PIM is not some unimportant game or so -- it's crucial for productivity.
And webkit is explicitly cited in the wheezy release notes as something that is not covered by their security guarantees. The only webkit browser that receives security attention is chromium; if you want to use some other webkit browser, you do so at your own risk. This is a reasonable stance to take for an organization with limited resources, particularly considering how niche the affected browsers are.
QtWebKit is not a single browser, it's the HTML rendering used by almost all KDE applications (excl. the few that still use KHTML).
And I don't see any reason in refusing to ship an important bugfix release that does not need any cherrypicked backporting. It simply proves that Debian is not as secure as masternerdguy claimed.
Considering that QtWebKit 2.2 is the version Debian users are stuck now for the next two years without any update in sight, Debian can be considered extremely dangerous.
Well, debian does backport all relevant security bugfixes.
No. Wheezy’s QtWebKit is stuck at version 2.2. QtWebKit 2.3.1 is out since a while featuring many important bugfixes of which none were backported: http://patch-tracker.debian.org/package/qtwebkit/2.2.1-5
Debian stable focuses in being a bugfree distribution, not a distribution comprised only of bugfree software.
That's not what masternerdguy wrote.
if you campare it to, say, Fedora 17's or even Kubuntu 12.04's KDE 4.8, you'll realize how marvelously quirkless Debian's KDE is and why it pays to have stabler distributions.
And when you look at openSUSE, your whole argument falls apart: openSUSE is also relatively conservative but still manages to bring recent GNOME, KDE SC, and Xfce releases to its users. That's because the openSUSE maintainers decide on a case by case basis (eg. they waited a while to adopt systemd or Plymouth) instead of blindly picking only old software.
Debian places a strong emphasis on stability compared to most distros. Instead of being on the bleeding edge they are conservative and try to provide a stable, bug free, and secure system
That generalized claim is wrong. Three prominent examples:
The KDE Workspaces/Apps releases 4.8.4 are less stable than 4.10.2. The 4.8.x releases as well as 4.9.x reached End Of Life quite some time ago and don't receive any bugfix any longer. 4.10.2 contains many bugfixes upstream doesn't bother backporting to older releases (at least not 4.8.x which is two versions behind).
Same with GNOME. I could understand if the package maintainers decided to use 3.6 instead of 3.8 because 3.6 still includes the Fallback Mode but 3.4 is old and unmaintained.
Xfce 4.10 is already a year old and 4.12 should be around the corner. 4.8 just unmaintained and lacks many crucial bugfixes from 4.10.
Not being cutting edge means not blindly jumping towards the latest dot-0 release. It means sticking to software with long term support (eg. Mozilla's ESR versions which regularly receive bugfixes).
However skipping releases that contain many bugfixes just for the sake of shipping >1 year old software has nothing to do with providing stability or security. On the contrary.
Bruce Schneier accurately predicts the random.
http://www.schneierfacts.com/facts/485
Bruce Schneier doesn't need to hide data with steganography - data hides from Bruce Schneier
Bruce Schneier knows who the Anonymous Coward is
Bruce Schneier can recite pi. Backwards.
Bruce Schneier can securely wipe any hard drive by shaking it like an etch-a-sketch.
Bruce Schneier knows Chuck Norris' private key.
Bruce Schneier can write a recursive program that proves the Riemann Hypothesis. In Malbolge.
Bruce Schneier can read captchas.
Hashes collide because they're swerving to avoid Bruce Schneier.
Bruce Schneier is the root of all certificates.
Bruce Schneier intercepts all your internal monologues by a man-in-the-middle attack.
http://www.schneierfacts.com/
Exactly what I meant.
So you mean that AMD FOSS drivers are better than NVidia's proprietary ones as well?
I agree that the Phoronix benchmarks are mostly stupid but the site also covers lots of stories other publications don't. Michael reads through git commit logs, has subscriptions to mailing lists of exotic Linux-related projects, etc. and he reports what he finds.
Filtering out the benchmark stories is still easier than to subscribe to all those mailing lists and search for useful info.
I take Phoronix over OSNews any day...
Every NVidia owner who uses Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. for at least one session.
Most distributions don't bundle proprietary drivers.
They didn't *completely* drop it. Their 5 full time employees for the open source driver can still work on the open source driver.
They don't work on drivers for legacy hardware. AFAIK most work on the R300 Mesa driver is done by Red Hat.
AMD releases hardware documentation but I have heard that especially for newer hardware it is not really complete
Due financial troubles, AMD had to fire many people, incl the majority of its Linux developers. Maybe that's why the docs are incomplete...
AMD allegedly has some code for the open source driver for power management and other stuff ready but they have always problems with legal review so they can't release it.
The Mesa wiki claims full power management support for almost all AMD GPUs. Can't verify that, though, as I'm currently on NVidia.
Yup. I still buy NVidia cards because they ACTUALLY WORK and they do a reasonable quality control effort on their drivers.
Really? So the 310.x and newer NVidia drivers don't actually crash when trying to initialize OpenGL on my GeForce 9200?
No shit. Fact is, Nvidia, with their closed-source binary-blob driver, STILL supports Linux better than ATI/AMD did/does. "Purity" is overrated, and variable, depending on who's doing defining it.
"Purity" means that the drivers work out of the box under all Linux distributions. The proprietary drivers must be re-installed every time a kernel upgrade is done which, depending on the Linux distribution, can be quite often.
KDevelop3 was a good development environment. It supported many languages. KDevelop4, last I checked, supported C++ and C.
Syntax highlighting for a huge amount of languages is inherited from Kate/KWrite.
For everything beyond that KDevelop uses plugins. These are available:
https://projects.kde.org/projects/extragear/kdevelop/plugins
https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/devtools/plugins/
Microsoft is probably just syncing its DirectX development cycle to the Xbox development cycle. So some time before the Xbox 4 MS will develop and release DirectX 12.
Yeah that was pretty cool. You could even adjust the level of fuzziness. I loved setting it high and have it tell me "late afternoon" or at the highest level "the middle of the week".
You can still do that. This clock just became a separate applet since the introduction of Plasma Desktop. It's in the plasma-addons package.
Can you recite specific cases? The situation with KHTML was when two different development models clash.
Apple's development model at that time was behind closed doors and doing that is not good FOSS citizenship.
Another example is Apple Public Source License 1.0.
Apple has contributed to and still contributes to many open source project today. LLVM, OpenCL, Darwin, cups, Bonjour/ZeroConf, etc.
Yes, today. I was referring to Apple's initial steps into FOSS development.
Apple dropped source code under APSL unless it had no choice. Today even Apple's own developments such as Bonjour or Dispatch are released under Apache License or BSD-like licenses and other parties can easily pick them up. Apple successfully set up WebKit as vendor-neutral project, joined LLVM and contributed Clang, even became the release manager of X.org at some point, etc.
Google should have learned from Apple's past mistakes. Yet, Google somehow successfully presents itself as great FOSS citizen, despite:
The Android kernel was as much of a "uncivil" fork of Linux as WebKit was from KHTML and it took much campaigning by Greg KH and others to get Google to even start to submit and maintain the patches upstream.
Google refused to implement a multi-process architecture directly in WebKit and insisted to make it Chrome-exclusive. Same with V8: No attempt to even try to optimize WebKit's JavaScriptCore, instead insisting on adding hard to maintain bindings for V8.