Canonical Announces Mir: A New Display Server Not On X11 Or Wayland 354
An anonymous reader writes "On the Ubuntu Wiki is now the Mir specification, which is a next-generation display server not based on X11/X.Org or Wayland. Canonical is rolling their own display server for future releases of Ubuntu for form factors from mobile phones to the desktop. Mir is still in development but is said to support Android graphics drivers, open-source Linux graphics drivers, and they're pressuring hardware vendors with commercial closed-source drivers to support it too. They also said X11 apps will be compatible along with GTK3 and Qt/QML programs. Canonical isn't using X11 or Wayland with their future Unity desktop as they see many shortcomings from these existing and commonly used components."
Re:Canonical swirling down to irrelevance. (Score:4, Informative)
I've heard that Debian is re-organizing its release cycle to meet some of the objections that have kept people on Ubuntu.
I've seen most of my Ubuntu friends switching to Fedora or Mint, not Debian, though.
Re:So now it's... (Score:5, Informative)
Licences:
GNU GPL v3, GNU LGPL v3, MIT / X / Expat Licence, Other/Open Source
(Boost Software License - Version 1.0)
https://launchpad.net/mir [launchpad.net]
Re:Terrible news from the Soviets at Canonical (Score:5, Informative)
>> "I also find the name to be odd. Do they name it after a soviet space station as an indication that they are planning to take away our rights in a soviet style dictatorship?"
I'm not sure if you're trolling or just ignorant, so let me share some knowledge in case anyone takes this silliness half seriously.
The Russian word "mir" is typically used to mean "world" or "peace", depending on its usage. The term "mir" can also be used in a similar sense to the English words "village", "community" or "global". The word "mir" is actually a perfect fit with the rest of Canonical's naming structure. Ubuntu refers to community, the Unity desktop is named with an idea of many coming together to form a whole, and Mir continues this trend as the term refers to a unified group or community.
Re:No, not again (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Canonical swirling down to irrelevance. (Score:5, Informative)
Also the Arch devs are entirely willing to let pacman break your system if you don't religiously keep up with the announcements on their website. If you let a system go for a few months and then run pacman without reading the last several announcements, your system has an excellent chance of being hosed in a way that requires manual tinkering.
Kubuntu? (Score:3, Informative)
I've been a user of Kubuntu since 2007 and happy too. I don't get why people only talk about ubuntu, and when disappointed with it switch to other distributions, when kubuntu still gives you the classical desktop experience, and not something broken like unity.
I hope that whatever they do with mir they don't end up breaking Kubuntu. At least it survived the unity madness, and doesn't send your keys to amazon.
Re:Canonical swirling down to irrelevance. (Score:4, Informative)
Eh?
Good to know to stay away from Arch.
Re:Good luck with that! (Score:4, Informative)
something on the display server (in X11 the client) is likely to be in GPU memory, and something on the application (in X11 the server) is definately in CPU memory
This is completely wrong. First, in X11, X is the server and the application is the client. Second, modern X11 applications do their own hardware-accelerated rendering in GPU memory and pass the rendered image to the X server for compositing, so the client/server memory distinction you're positing doesn't exist. Neither does "network transparency" in any meaningful sense; the extensions which allow efficient local rendering, like XShm and DRI2, aren't available over the network, so application can either use a completely different rendering path, forfeiting transparency, or get horrible performance due to the complete lack of image compression in the X protocol and the fact that inputs to the rendering process (particularly things like textures) are often much larger than the differences in the output from frame to frame. Rendering with local hardware acceleration and sending the results over the network in the form of compressed video, a la VNC, RDP, XPRA, and the plans for remote Wayland, is much more efficient, and actually transparent to the application.