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.
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...you mean 20 years later.
That's about how long it took for Microsoft to get their act together and catch up to what X had from the beginning. Now you twits are going to replicate that and set the Linux desktop back 20 years.
That's what happens when you first ignore something and then have to retrofit it.
It makes things unnecessarily painful when compared to just paying attention to that requirement to begin with.
"apposed?" (Score:5, Insightful)
This just proves it's NIH (Score:4, Informative)
This just proves what everyone was saying last week. This decision was entirely based on NIH (Not in House) Syndrome. Ubuntu is convinced that they have to spend all their development resources on reinventing the wheel because Wayland isn't an internal project (but it could be).
It wasn't 6 months ago that Shuttleworth was complaining that Ubuntu needed to start making money, and here he is wasting development resources on reinventing things. Between Mir, Upstart, Harmony, and all the others he's going to have forked everything but the kernel (hey maybe that's next!, I hear forking the FreeBSD Kernel is common) and his costs only go up while he spends all his time fixing bugs all by himself. The result will be Ubuntu advancement will slow down, or it will become a buggy POS with no long term security.
Either way I think they suffer from NIH disease and maybe they should consider a fork of the FreeBSD kernel. I imagine it won't be long before Mint/Arch or whatever fully replaces all the popularity Ubuntu managed to create. I already see Mint recommended more often than Ubuntu.
Re:This just proves it's NIH (Score:5, Informative)
...This decision was entirely based on NIH (Not in House) Syndrome...
NIH = Not Invented Here
Re:This just proves it's NIH (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately the grandparent has NIH, so he had to reinvent the acronym.
Re:This just proves it's NIH (Score:5, Funny)
Doesn't come more meta than that.
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I hereby award you this thread and 10 Internets. (OP is defo making stuff up.)
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What makes you think that the acronym you think is the right one is the one I even intended?
Because in context "National Institutes of Health" wouldn't make sense?
Re:This just proves it's NIH (Score:5, Funny)
You're doing the bright-but-butthurt 14-y-o thing pretty well there. Keep up the good work.
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Look, sometimes you are just wrong - this is one of them. Nothing to be ashamed of, we all get it wrong from time to time. The difference is in how you deal with it, so far you are not doing it very well...
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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 - look like they'll outweigh the costs of having to duplicate effort.
They are doing it because they want to do it. So if you are someone who relies on backwards compatibility, cross-compatibility, or some feature in X that they don't care about, then you should realize that this is basically the guys at Canonical giving you the middle finger.
Also, it should be mentioned that one of the primary features of a good API is that it communicates its purpose well to those who want to use it. This is a communication i
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>"here today gone tomorrow" guys
except for the fact that they are largely all the people that have been driving X development for years and years...
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Re:This just proves it's NIH (Score:5, Informative)
Dunno about the younger guys, but Keith was an X dev way back in the day. And by back in the day I mean 1988.
At least a few of the other devs where from the XFree era...
Re:This just proves it's NIH (Score:5, Informative)
Wayland is being developed by the same people behind X.org. 99.9% of the people lambasting Wayland have no idea what it is, what it's going to accomplish or how entrenched it already is.
Wayland is the future. It will take some time to get everything in place but it's already in play and many other project from the kernel to window managers are already moving towards implementing the plumbing necessary. Given this is slashdot I'm not particularly surprised by the ignorance, nor that people think something as complex as a complete rewrite of the GUI could be accomplished in weeks nor am I surprised that no one has bothered to actually learn about wayland and what it is but frankly the hatred is a bit surprising given the total ignorance. People hate software they know nothing about because they are afraid of change, it's just silly.
You think they would at least try to learn what it is given that almost all the people behind it are the same people behind X.org.
mod parent up (Score:3)
one of the few here who knows what they are talking about
Re:This just proves it's NIH (Score:5, Insightful)
Wayland is being developed by the same people behind X.org.
So? Xorg is boring. It doesn't need to change all that fast. It's not new and interesting. Careful improvements is far less funt than nuking it and starting again. Just because they develop Xorg doesn't mean they're not hopelessly biased for other reasons.
99.9% of the people lambasting Wayland have no idea what it is, what it's going to accomplish or how entrenched it already is.
Then enilghten us.
Wayland is the future.
I hope not.
It will take some time to get everything in place but it's already in play and many other project from the kernel to window managers are already moving towards implementing the plumbing necessary.
WTF? You really have no clue. The kernel side stuff is just for graphics and works as well with X11 as anything else. Secondly for "plumbing" there is no plu8mbing for window managers. WMs are replaced entirely by the compositor. None of the X11 WMs will work. It's a completely different architecture.
Given this is slashdot I'm not particularly surprised by the ignorance,
Is the irony intended.
nor am I surprised that no one has bothered to actually learn about wayland and what it is but frankly the hatred is a bit surprising given the total ignorance. People hate software they know nothing about because they are afraid of change, it's just silly.
Change is not always good, especially when it's for the better. Wayland looses us network transparency. So far all the counters to this tell me that (a) I'm lieing and I don't really want it (b) it can be hacked on after a la VNC and (c) it can be hacked on at the toolkit level providing a delightful level of inconsistency.
Those are not good arguments. (a) is particularly insulting.
You think they would at least try to learn what it is given that almost all the people behind it are the same people behind X.org.
And these are the user-hostile numpties who have come up with some really dubious decisions of late.
For instance, nixing the "kill active grab" keystroke, because it shouldn't be needed because it's caused by buggy programs. I mean WTF? How is that any comfort when some buggy program locks up the X server again and I have to switch to a console and try to kill it (if I can even find which one).
And they've decided that the Wayland policy is to have client side decorations "because it will allow consistend window decorations". The last point is an outright lie---it cannot be explained by incompetence. So in addition to having inconsistent decorations (from each toolkit, unlike now), hung windows will be immovable.
But that's OK because that's an application bug and apparently those don't ever happen. Especially not to developers.
Oh and then there's the persistent lie about X11 on Wayland. It's a lie because it's a half truth intended to decieve which probably makes it even worse. Of course you can run X11 on it. You can run X11 on a dead mouse, OS9/8/7/6 OSX, Win95, DOS Win 3.11 and modern Windows. That doesn't mean the user experience will be integrated and it doesn't mean that thw Wayland programs get the same advantages.
I wouldn't mind Wayland nearly so much if the creators (who also apparently had a lot to do with X) weren't such blantant FUD machines. If they're demonstrably lieing about a system they know in detail then it gives the feeling that they're really messing things up.
That and they've taken a really user hostile turn recently.
The thing is, thatWayland could be quite useful for multiplexing consoles and X11 sessions (if you care about graphical transitions between them, which I manifestly do not). But it's being sold very forcefully as a replacement general windowing system and due to the design lacks a number of really important feautres. If I have to choose between fancy transitions to ctrl+alt+f1 and remote windowing, I and many other slashdotters would choose the latter in a heartbeat.
And that is why there is so much hate for Wayland here: it's been earned.
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Actually, what you could do is stop telling people what they should be doing with their own time.
If you actually read my post you would see that I didn't do that. I would in fact never presume to do such a thing.
However when they post long detailed, deceptive and insulting arguments as to why their system is better than the one I prefer, I certainly reserve the right to yell "bullshit" very loudly.
Also, if they do sumbass things like remove really handy features I also reserve the right to call it a dumbass
Re:This just proves it's NIH (Score:5, Informative)
Wayland is being developed by the same people behind X.org.
That explains my number one complaint about Wayland: the documentation is terrible. Truly awful. I mean this in a very specific way: there is insufficient information there to tell me how I could get a surface on which I could render things, and there is insufficient information there to permit me to do an independent reimplementation of the client library. My only recourse would be to read the source code, but right now that doesn't seem to help either. (Sure, I could connect and probably get a surface, but I have no idea what I could do with that surface or how I would change the handle into something that some other library could draw on.) There's just too much information missing, and that's about par for the course with anything produced by the folks from X.org; they can code cleanly enough, but they can't document critical info.
I am a GUI toolkit maintainer. I'm not porting anything away from X11 for now because I just don't see enough of a platform to port to. (Some bits are probably there. Some definitely aren't. I have other things to do as well as filling out gaping holes in others' critical info.)
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If you want network transparency, you need to use a protocol like NX.
NX builds on top of X. The right thing to do is not ditch X, but to build NX into X.
And it's not hard to add this into Wayland, in fact I'm pretty sure that's the plan.
Then why hasn't anyone from the project said "All Wayland apps will be network transparent by default."? It's an easy thing to do that would quiet a lot of FUD.
That it is possible to implement network transparency with Wayland is not enough. It must be impossible to imple
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Sure, that could be part of it, but I think a careful reading would show that there were a number of things missing from Wayland that they wanted, and there were a number of things that would have required some heavy patching to get what they wanted, which probably wouldn't have been any better than starting anew anyway. This way they also don't have to worry about whether or not their patches get accepted upstream.
I guess they could have forked Wayland, but if they're not going to use most of that code any
Re:This just proves it's NIH (Score:4, Insightful)
And the misinformation is already being quoted as fact. Per the discussion on G+ where the Wayland developers responded to the FUD from Canonical, AFAIK none of the claimed missing feature of Wayland are even missing. In fact from what I was reading tonight touch input has already been implemented in Wayland and the work on virtual keyboards and such is being worked on (Canonical hasn't even started this part of MIR).
Given the Canonical didn't even talk to the Wayland project it's not surprising but what Canonical claimed is nothing but FUD. They are trying to back justify their decision, but they didn't even bother to learn about Wayland before creating a bunch of false assumptions and FUD. Unfortunately that FUD is so far out there now that people are even quoting it as fact.
Go to G+ and google MIR, you'll find a number of threads where the Wayland developers point out that Canonical outright lied about what Wayland could/couldn't do. The linked post basically points this out, they didn't talk to Wayland, they didn't find out about wayland, they just wanted something they had total control over.
In the end they'll end up with a monster that eats coder time to no actual benefit where had they devoted those developers to Wayland they could have had more input into Wayland AND helped it get here quicker. It's a sad story of Shuttleworth desire for total control, even if what he ends up with is unmaintainable crap that's dropped after 2 versions and fragments the community in the interim. All because he wants a tablet/phone OS in a very crowded space.
It's ironic, if he wanted Android so bad, why didn't he just fork Android. The reality is he doesn't have the resources to do what Google did. Instead he's going to create a Frankenstein blend of (half-assed) Wayland, X and SurfaceFlinger that will likely have all the worst of each and none of the benefits.
Playing devil's advocate (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I haven't seen evidence that Ubuntu possesses the talent or the manpower. Time and again, I've either read about or experienced firsthand halfassed, quite unnecessary 'improvements' while watching them neglect the fundamentals.
So, like most every other thing they've done for the past five years, this decision may be fine in theory (I'm not super familiar with the issues surrounding Wayland, so I can't say for sure), but in practice will quickly become a category five disaster.
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I'm almost inclined to cut Canonical some slack here. Almost. I don't think NIH is such a horrible thing if the project in question still isn't anywhere near usable. In a situation like this, it's entirely possible that a team of paid, full time, competent programmers could start over from scratch and quickly surpass the original project. Given equal talent and effort, the Cathedral is always more efficient better than the Bazaar.
This is showcased nicely by the previous projects near-single-handedly developed by Canonical: Bazaar (heh; there were actually two iterations of it, both ultimately crap) and Upstart. Interestingly, neither of those was clearly NIH-motivated, they just were not satisfactory from the engineering standpoint as later, better projects have demonstrated.
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What's wrong with Upstart? Doesn't it restart services like it's supposed to?
Not entirely the wrong choice though (Score:2)
Re:This just proves it's NIH (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubuntu is convinced that they have to spend all their development resources on reinventing the wheel because Wayland isn't an internal project (but it could be).
You simply invoke "NIH-syndrome" without clarifying why Canonical is making the wrong decision in this specific case. You are implying that it is *never* a good decision to do things in-house when an existing solution (however imperfect) is already available. But looking around at technology companies that are successful (Apple, Google, Amazon), it is obvious that your reasoning is flawed, as all these companies have, on occasion, done things in-house when existing solutions were already available.
Clearly, the decision to do something in-house or not is more complex than following a stupid rule of thumb.
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You miss the point. Ubuntu wanted to use Wayland. They said it is a great idea when the project started. But then the project got somewhat stuck. The public available documentation is weak, which makes it very complicated to add to the project. Furthermore, Ubuntu proposed to use a "test-driven" development method. While such a decision is debatable, the Wayland project does not talk about its development method.
Hopefully, the both sides do a lot of talking (which is already taking place) and in the end the
Probably actually CADT. (Score:3)
I mean, NIH is one thing, but this kind of thing goes way past that. Ubuntu is in the full-throttle grip of CADT [jwz.org].
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.
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What? It's an X server which allows GL stuff to be rendereded accelerated. How does Xorg (with AIGLX) not fit that criteria?
Someone didn't do their homework... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
The disagreement was purely technical.
The XGL approach caused a bunch of peformance problems for various rendering scenarios (stereo3d, overlays like video) - XGL forced everything through a pixmap to be rendered by GL.
No acceleration using the GPU for video / scaling or anything else.
XGL was cool because it was first and everyone got googly eyed at the effects. It probably was a catalyst in getting the right solution (AIGLX), too.
Wrong spelling (Score:4, Interesting)
"our own thing — we can do exactly what we w (Score:2, Insightful)
"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."
IOW, Fuck GPL and collaboration.
Canonical better find an attitude. This is why they are disliked by the Debian team and others.
This is also why I dislike Shuttleworth and Canonical - the lack of helpful upstream collaboration.
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the lack of helpful upstream collaboration
You've just got to get downstream from them.
not likely to be competent to do it (Score:3, Insightful)
We know what a disaster it was when Canonical tried to adopt PulseAudio in Ubuntu. Basically they broke audio for no good reason. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio#Problems_during_adoption_phase [wikipedia.org] for more info.)
Mir would seem to be an order of magnitude more difficult to pull off, since it's to be developed in-house by Canonical, and video is *much* more complex than audio.
Over all, it seems extremely unlikely to me that Canonical is competent to succeed in this.
They also don't seem to have learned their lesson from the PulseAudio experience in terms of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
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?
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http://nearwen.com/2013/02/client-comment-poster-i-really-like-the-colour-but-can-you-change-it/ [nearwen.com] :D
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They want conceptually something like Wayland, but not the concrete realization.
And if you disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)
The great thing about Linux is... You can simply choose to not use Ubuntu. BAM! Problem solved.
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Indeed! I do like that they explore things though. The X.org folks need a kick in the rear. They seem to think graphics has been solved. Not that it has gotten noticeably better since the X.org fork-off, but it is still pretty bad.
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Wups, that should read "Not that it has not gotten noticeably better".
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Have you paid any attention to Linux graphics in, I don't know, the past year or so? Missed the whole Wayland thing, did you? Missed the part of this where all the X/Wayland devs are basically yelling "Why did start reimplementing Wayland late, with slight variations?"
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I follow it, but apparently I did understand what was going on, in contrast to you.
Re:And if you disagree... (Score:4, Insightful)
The great thing about Linux is... You can simply choose to not use Ubuntu. BAM! Problem solved.
Not quite. Linux users do rely on a large amount of other users making it viable and interesting to make applications, drivers, etc. for the platform. The more Ubuntu succeeds in gathering Linux users to their Ubuntu OS, the smaller the rest of the Linux market becomes.
Canonical wants to go their own way in order to distinguish themselves from other distributions in order to gather more Linux market share (larger slice), rather than attempt to cooperate with others to grow the market (larger cake). Canonical does not have the resources to compete with Apple, Google or Microsoft on their own, so their fragmentation of the Linux base will only result in a net loss for Linux and free software.
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So your saying that as long as Ubuntu satisfies the needs of their growing user base, they will succeed in becoming a dominate player in the Linux distribution market.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. Competition is good and it is not like Ubuntu is selling their distribution at a loss to put their competition out of business. Every distribution has a chance to grow in popularity, all they need to do is cater to their user's needs.
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Not quite. Linux users do rely on a large amount of other users making it viable and interesting to make applications, drivers, etc. for the platform. The more Ubuntu succeeds in gathering Linux users to their Ubuntu OS, the smaller the rest of the Linux market becomes.
Just. WOW.
It's amazing that a zero-sum assessment of desktop Linux would be modded up like this. Ubuntu is trying to get past distro-itis or the Linux distro curse that has made the genre so repellent to most desktop users and app developers. If none of the distros are able to enlarge Linux' overall share of the desktop, its because none of them have quite figured out personal computing.
In any case, it should be becoming clear by now that 'Linux' is not an operating system by any means that a typical deskto
Why not X? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not continue using and developing on and for X? It is and remains -the- standard way for UNIX applications to get a graphical user interface. X is also largely platform independent. If I want to run my X server on system A and the applications on system B, it is the X protocol that separates my desktop from my applications. My display is not necessarily directly connected to the computer I run my applications on.
Ignorance on display (Score:5, Informative)
You're just betraying your ignorance of Wayland. Wayland does NOT replace X windows. In fact Wayland was designed from scratch so that an X server can run in wayland WITH NO PERFORMANCE PENALTY.
So with Wayland you can STILL run your old legacy X11 apps and get decent performance too!
Win win all around! What is the downside?
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It wasn't invented at canonical from what i can tell from TFA.
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huh?
Re:Ignorance on display (Score:4, Insightful)
what are the benefits of Wayland for the end users. No benefit for users. What can I do with Wayland that I couldn't do with Xorg?
You can have a display server with 10% of the code and 10% of the bugs!
TELL US MORE about how pruning dead code and reducing the number of bugs is not a benefit for the user.
TELL US MORE about the benefits of maintaining DEAD UNUSABLE remote code! WHY should users put up with the performance issues associated with years and years of X lossage?
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The downside is that a lot of development resources are being funneled to the rewrite of functionality currently quite well implemented by Xorg.
QUITE WELL MAINTAINED???
do you actually use X windows at all?
It's buggy as heck and its performance is miserable.
Your crack about "developement resources" is pretty funny because the original X developers are also developing Wayland because they are SICK of funneling their development resources into fixing X bugs.
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Bullshit. The whole reason for supporting network transparency by default is that no one has to write "network friendly" apps. It "just works".
network transparency is not nearly as useful as it used to be
I use network transparency every day. With GUI apps that use pixmaps, borders, and shadows. With FreeNX, the extra rendering time is barely perceptible.
But even if you were right, for the sake of argument, and we had to choose between network transparency and pretty widgets, network transparency is the
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Yeah let's just FORGET ALL ABOUT OSX
Yeah let's just FORGET ALL ABOUT Android, it is UNIX and it has a graphical user interface!
Mozilla Firefox is on Android too!
Wait for it.... Waaaaait.....
YES, EMAC FOR ANDROID [google.com]! Yay.
You neglected a bunch of stuff you stupids, pathetic and stupid, hrmph.
Remember; on sentence per line, just like they taught you.
Stupids.
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duh, your are just proving my point!
X windows is NOT "standard"
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.
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I have done all you say is impossible, with little to no issues. So now we have competing anecdotes, how about next time you provide some actual data to go with your FUD?
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No problems here with Intel and rare problems with AMD chips. Maybe you are tied to a company that doesn't like openness?
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I've never had a problem with X on open source hardware. Only closed sourced shit causes problems.
Re:remote X is garbage anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
X itself goes to great lengths to avoid being affected by latency.
How about this quote from Keith Packard:
---
One of the design ``mistakes'' of X11 exacerbated by its very success is the extensible type system called atoms (as in the Lisp systems from which it was derived). This has been heavily used in the interclient communications protocols used between applications (primarily toolkits) and window managers. The InternAtom function requires a round trip to provide agreement among clients on a small (32 bit) handle for a string. A modern design would almost certainly avoid round trips entirely by using cryptographic hashes (or just using strings everywhere). Unfortunately, it is very hard to retrofit this
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X was designed when CPUs ran at 8 MHz, the network ran at 10 Mbit and the display was black and white.
In 1985, the network was FAST and the computers were SLOW so latency was not so much of an issue.
Today the network is SLOW and the computers are FAST and so network latency rears its ugly head.
I have to ask: if it works so great, why does nobody use it? Why doesn't it work with sound? Why can't I use it for my Windows or OSX apps like I can with VNC?
If X makes it too hard to write a decently performing application, THAT ALONE is good reason to dump it
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This is a weird comment, especially from one so illustrious as Keith Packard, though perhaps not surprising.
In well written X11 programs...
An aside. There's no point in talking about anything else. You can make badly written programs for any system perform arbitrarily badly. X11 is no exception. It's only worth talking abotu well well written programs and how easy it is to write them.
Anyway continuing.
I've done quite a lot of Xlib hacking.
Atoms are 32 bit handles for strings. Strings (i.e.) atoms are used f
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I'm also tempted to make an unkind jab at Keith Packard here, since he's shown signs of suffering from C hacker syndrome. Perhaps if he used C++ and set up a std::map in his program he could use strings throughout and not have to worry about efficiency of lookups or excessive roundtrips from inappropriate use of InternAtom.
Of course that would be much harder in C where you'd have to write your own hash map or RB tree...
XInternAtoms (Score:3)
Yes, InternAtom requires a round trip, but only a newbie would use it often. If you have a lot of atoms (and any nontrivial X11 application does), you use the XInternAtoms call, which will stream all the requests into a single round trip. You can also use libXcb and do that to all the other calls as well. With proper design you only need 3-4 roundtrips to get your app fully loaded.
Re:remote X is garbage anyway (Score:5, Informative)
Here are some RESULTS from an experiment done by lbl.gov
The first number is X windows tunneled through SSH
the second number is VNC
the third number is NX
Start Matlab (-nosplash) 9.6s 4.9s 5s
Open edit window 2.9s 1.3s 1.2s
Activate File menu 0.6s 0.1s 0.1s
Activate Edit menu 0.6s 0.1s 0.1s
Activate Text menu 0.5s 0.2s 0.1s
Close edit window, redraw main window 1.5s 0.4s 0.3s
Close matlab 0.5s 0.6s 0.6s
As you can see REMOTE X WINDOWS SUCKS
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]
Re:Context please? (Score:4, Informative)
This is follow-up to this story [slashdot.org] from a week ago.
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.
Re:Context please? (Score:4, Insightful)
The comments from e.g. Dave Airlie, Kristian Høgsberg, Daniel Stone are even better, IMO, since they are Xorg/Wayland guys. Though Aaron is certainly a graphics guy, just at a higher level on the stack.
Re: (Score:3)
the merits or lack thereof in choosing the Mir project over Weyland
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
One day Git will be Bzr. One day Gnome will be Unity. One day X will be Mir. One day Linus Torvalds will be a gray-haired beggar on the street, still acting like an immature teenager, implying that people on the LKML would do better spending more of their time sucking cocks; and Canonical will be running the new, improved, coded-from-scratch, Linux-compatible Ubrik kernel.
Re: (Score:2)
it has "canonical" in it.
that means it's a tech article about canonical doing some re-inventing of the wheel to get rid of some options shown to user.
Re:Context please? (Score:5, Funny)
I can think of no context in which a furniture designer engineer, no matter how agile or standards-conforming would have as similarly viable alternatives a former Russian space station and an animated sycophant.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Because inexperienced, but otherwise intelligent, people often believe that they can do stuff better than everyone before them, there is a trend among hackers to rewrite otherwise perfectly fine code. Since X dates back decades, according to this line of thinking, it must need to be rewritten. "Wayland" is on such attempt (actually, what they are doing isn't nearly as sophisticated as X). Since Cannonical believes they are the shit, they want to be in control of the X successor. Their candidate is "Mir". I
Re:Context please? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your assertion that Wayland will not go anywhere seems to be predicated on the incorrect assumptions that Wayland is born of naïvety (it's not; it's developed by people with a LOT of real experience working on the current X-centric stack), and that it needs to entirely supplant X to succeed (it doesn't; it deliberately does a lot less, and it can host a rootless X server, and indeed this is the only realistic use case for it on regular desktop distributions for the next couple of years).
Yes, there are many projects that are started for the reasons you describe, and go on to fail for those same reasons. But Wayland is not one of them. That is not to say that its success is guaranteed—but rather only that your reasons to assume its failure is inevitable are invalid.
Wayland does not need to destroy decades of compatibility. In fact, its approach is quite the opposite: to maximize compatibility initially (pass almost everything through to a rootless X server with XWayland if you want), and then offer an optional smooth migration path away from X for applications that don't need its complexity, would like to push the complexity into separate components, or would like to take advantage of some of the things that you simply can't achieve with X today, e.g., flicker-free from boot, to playing a game, and then on to playing hardware-accelerated videos.
You concede that the current state of video drivers being too tightly tied to X is terrible, so I assume you agree that the work has to be done to resolve that at some point, whatever path we collectively take. That also happens to be the only thing I'm aware of that's really holding Wayland back from mainstream use today. Everything else is just little bits and pieces that need to be finished or polished up, and then it could be dropped in to real general purpose distros.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your assertion that Wayland will not go anywhere seems to be predicated on the incorrect assumptions that Wayland is born of naïvety (it's not; it's developed by people with a LOT of real experience working on the current X-centric stack)
His point wasn't that they are inexperienced with X, it's that they are inexperienced with software development in general. It's fairly common for inexperienced (though otherwise skillful) programmers to decide to re-implement a huge chunk of code in the hopes to make it better. It rarely works out very well.
Re: (Score:2)
His point wasn't that they are inexperienced with X, it's that they are inexperienced with software development in general
Which is just an incorrect point, since as the poster you replied to pointed out these are the SAME PEOPLE who have developed many of the modern enhancements to X that keep it useful today.
How does he make any sense at all when he talks about how great X is and that they should pay attention to those who worked on it when they ARE the people who worked on it?
Re: (Score:3)
Having worked on the X Server in no way means their choice to create a new server is correct. Whenever someone forks software that's worked fine for nearly 30 years, the default position is, "they're making a mistake."
Maybe you're right and it's a great thing. We'll see.
Re: (Score:3)
First - it's not a fork. Forks are branches of the code. Wayland is a completely new display server.
And I'll just say I'm glad Apple decided NOT to use X by default on OSX. They managed to create a much more efficient display engine by not continuing to base it on the largely obsolete X protocol. Though, guess what, there is also a perfectly usable backwards-compatible optional X-server you can install if you want (which is a goal of Wayland, and I assume Mir, as well).
Re:Context please? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
OS X is certified Unix. It's not X, but X isn't Unix.
The UI has a lineage going back to the 1984 Mac (and Lisa) but everything else is NeXT/OpenStep.
Re:Context please? (Score:5, Insightful)
This cult of Apple admirers would be amusing if they weren't potentially so destructive. They seem to blindly follow Apple without actually having any real experience with the product. They just swallow the usual media hype wholesale and then go on to replicate Apple's mistakes.
They also don't understand how an X server relates to the rest of MacOS.
Broad generalizations and assumptions never helps your point. I have worked on kernel and userspace graphics and video overlay drivers for Linux/X11, so I know plenty about how X11 and display servers in general work.
I do have a Mac. I also have a PC running Windows, and one running Linux (and honestly at this point VMs on these machines running more than one OS at a time - with fairly good unity/coherence modes, as long as we are talking display servers and window managers).
Some of us use computers as tools for accomplishing what we want at work, home, entertainment, etc and have no interest in blind Apple admirers OR blind Apple detractors (or Microsoft, or Linux, or any other software for that matter). Why does technology have to be like politics to some people?
(oh, and to your other comment, MacOS is more "UNIX" than Linux is, and is certified SUSv3 (for what that's worth, but it's worth more than your opinion on the matter).
Re:Context please? (Score:4, Insightful)
His point wasn't that they are inexperienced with X, it's that they are inexperienced with software development in general. It's fairly common for inexperienced (though otherwise skillful) programmers to decide to re-implement a huge chunk of code in the hopes to make it better. It rarely works out very well.
That assumes that X11 was universally well-designed in the first place. It also assumes that experienced developers have been maintaining it (they all got laid off in the 1990s and nothing happend for 10 years). And it assumes that X11 is full of stuff that people care about, when much of it is legacy and not used by modern applications.
Eventually someone is going to have to suck it up and do something. Even if it was removing all the crap and making an "X12".
Re: (Score:3)
Apparently you have never programmed with X11 , because that is one of the most stupid comments I have ever heard and bears no relation to reality.
The X protocol contains various graphics primatives, facilities for dealing with fonts, setting colors, color managment facilities, and so on. There are extensions for non-rectangular windows, for faster video, shared memory buffers, and other things that have become desired over the years. There is really nothing in X11 that an application could not use to rende
Re: (Score:2)
it's that they are inexperienced with software development in general.
So WHY do we let them fix X bugs?
Re: (Score:2)
This, everyone seems to think wayland is more than it is. For now it's basicaly an overhyped screen multiplexer for X.
Re:Context please? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple did it and it seems to be working out just fine. They could have tried to use X but probably had the same reasons as Canonical, full control.
Sometimes the only way to get better results is to tear it all down and start over. You learn from the past but let go of the baggage.
Re: (Score:2)
I hope they had the same reasons that most intelligent engineers have; X Sucks.
Quote from book: Steve Jobs told the USENIX audience in Phoenix, in June 1987, "that x was brain-damaged"
Source: http://books.google.de/books?id=CpAlTYwJJgAC&lpg=PA54&dq=%22Steve%20Jobs%20told%20the%20USENIX%20audience%20in%20Phoenix%2C%20in%20June%201987%2C%20%22that%20x%20was%20brain-damaged%22%22&hl=de&pg=PA54#v=onepage&q=%22Steve%20Jobs%20told%20the%20USENIX%20audience%20in%20Phoenix,%20in%20June%201987,%20%22that%20x%20was%20brain-damaged%22%22&f=false [google.de]
Re:Context please? (Score:4, Informative)
What features are missing from OS X's display system that were present in OS 9?
The OS9 Finder' which was powerful
Use of Fitt's law in design
Interface consistency
First controls differ in location and in tone
Symbols consistent with actions.
Clickable action and light up zone matching
Variable spacing for controls as a preference
Control of justification and spacing on the menu bar
etc...
Re: (Score:2)
I concur. What the hell are they talking about?
Its about some guy that thought he wanted to go out with Wayland Smithers, but would like him to have great muscle tone, be in to martial arts, and many more things. He was thinking of putting Wayland on a body building and martial arts course but then decided it would be quicker just to go with Frank Mir [wikipedia.org] instead.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
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: (Score:2)
mechanism for communication between client and servers
I hope you meant remote clients and servers. Otherwise it's just X all over again, but slightly different. One thing Windows and OS X get right is that their GUI is based around local API calls.
Re:Anything but X (Score:5, Interesting)
So what exactly is wrong with X? Please be specific.
Re:Anything but X (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, all you can do is parrot decades old grumbling.
Alex had more sense than you.