More From Canonical Employee On: "Why Mir?" 337
An anonymous reader writes "Canonical Desktop and Mobile Engineer Christopher Halse Rogers explains in more detail the decision for Mir as apposed to Wayland. Although Halse Rogers 'was not involved in the original decision to create Mir,' he's had 'discussions with those who were.' 'We want something like Wayland, but different in almost all the details.' 'The upsides of doing our own thing — we can do exactly and only what we want, we can build an easily-testable codebase, we can use our own infrastructure, we don't have an additional layer of upstream review.' In a separate post Halse Rogers answer the question: Does this fragment the Linux graphics driver space?"
Fragment the Linux graphics driver space? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Does this fragment the Linux graphics driver space?"
No. That's the point of DRM and KMS. X11, Wayland, DirectFB, Mir, Xynth, whatever all share the same kernel drivers and userspace display and graphics libraries.
Re:Context please? (Score:4, Interesting)
Go to the comments in TFA about details. There is some really juicy repartee between Seigo (OSS developer) and Shuttleworth (guy who funds Ubuntu).
There is a dust up going on between people working on the replacement for X under Ubuntu, and on the merits or lack thereof in choosing the Mir project over Weyland. Seigo and others make some interesting points, especially about the selection criteria.
Good for Ubuntu (Score:4, Interesting)
We could have had a modern display server years ago with XGL/Xegl. But it was killed off because Red Hat and nVidia didn't like. Mainly because it wasn't their idea. Now it seems all the pissing and moaning is coming from the Red Hat camp. Well karma's a bitch ain't it.
Wrong spelling (Score:4, Interesting)
Wha? (Score:3, Interesting)
'We want something like Wayland, but different in almost all the details.'
If you change all the details then won't it be very unlike Wayland?
remote X is garbage anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Everybody says "ooh noooo don't kill remote X windows! it's the best!"
except for one thing: IT SUCKS.
Have you ever tried to actually USE remote X? It's just beyond horrible.
The failure is that X was designed for low-latency between the display and the application, and that use case is just not very useful.
In reality the display and the application are connected over a high-latency link and X is UNUSABLE in this context.
VNC does not assume a low-latency link and so it remains responsive and pleasant even over a crappy ADSL connection.
Go ahead and TRY to use Firefox remotely over your ISP connection. It's just a pathetic joke and you will kill it out of frustration before even a single page loads.
Try the exact same thing with a VNC connection and it works just fine.
Re:Just pulling a Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Not many people were bitching when Google went a lot farther than this with every aspect of Android
There's a small difference: Google wasn't a two-bit Linux shop with a chronic lack of cash.
Android was a two-bit Linux shop with a chronic lack of cash UNTIL GOOGLE BOUGHT THEM
Re:Anything but X (Score:5, Interesting)
So what exactly is wrong with X? Please be specific.
See then believe (Score:2, Interesting)
The other day I saw a video of some Wayland developer in front of
group of developers, some of whom were X developers.
It was really embarrassing.
The Wayland guy was all trying to be cool, second guessing X and
poking fun at it and presenting the image of how on earth we all could
have gotten by with tsuch a lousy naive piece of shit.
Almost noone in the audience dared to contradict this totally
unrespectful smug piece of shit, and point out the shoulders that his
shaky boots were standing on.
To me though I saw it coming that the joke was on him. Wayland is
just a name and a lot of foam and fuzz.
X has been around 30 years. They must have done SOMETHING
right.
Canonical lately (Score:5, Interesting)
Canonical is behaving very "weird" lately.
This is an interview with Jonathan Riddell, the lead on Kubuntu [1].
Quotes:
"I only had contact with the Linux Mint developer recently when Canonical claimed that they needed a licence to use the compiled packages from Ubuntu. This is a dangerous misunderstanding of copyright licencing from a company which should understand it. I advised Linux Mint to say some rude things to Canonical but I think they're too polite for that."
"Canonical has the trademark of Kubuntu so they had to get a trademark licence from Canonical which took many months of long and slow negotiations. It was very frustracting to have Canonical be the blocker for part of the Ubuntu community since Canonical should be an enabler for the Ubuntu community (at least when we don't compete directly). So we did look at changing the name of Kubuntu but were told by Mark we'd be kicked out the project if we did that which would be a worst case scenario for everyone."
"Since then Canonical has started asking for donations when downloading Ubuntu and one option is to give "Better support for flavours like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu Slider thumb". Kubuntu has never received any of these funds or seen any better support, so this is a disappointing case of fraud."
[1] http://www.muktware.com/5369/how-will-changes-ubuntu-affect-kubuntu-exclusive-interview-jonathan-riddell [muktware.com]