Ex-Red Hat Employee Matthew Garrett Comments On the State of XMir 88
First time accepted submitter slack_justyb writes "Matthew Garrett, former employee of Red Hat, comments on the current state of XMir and Canonical's recent decision to not ship XMir as the default display server in Ubuntu 13.10. Noting the current issues outstanding in XMir, the features yet to be implemented, the security loopholes, and Intel's recent rejection to support Mir in general. All of this leading Garrett to the conclusion that 'It's clear that XMir has turned into a larger project than Canonical had originally anticipated, but that's hardly surprising.'"
Re:XMir is dead. (Score:3, Insightful)
Who is going to run X, Mir, Wayland, or fucking SurfaceFlinger on a web server or router? You don't run any desktop environment on those systems.
"Ubuntu Phone" (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFA:
Mir could have done the same, but doesn't because of a conscious design decision - in the Ubuntu Phone world, clients stop doing things when they're told to. Ubuntu Desktop is expected to behave the same way.
So they're letting design decisions for their phone interface dictate how they implement their desktop interface. It's the same stupidity that the Gnome developers are engaged in. A desktop is not "just another kind of phone," and if you treat your primary users as second-class citizens, they'll all jump ship.
Re:Poor Mattthew Garrett (Score:5, Insightful)
As for Mir, forking away is not a great thing to see but Canonical have the right to do it.
Re:Uh yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
X is nice in that it is sort-of network transparent, but now that RDP can do it's magic at the application level, it's probably worth going that route. X can be very, very slow over a typical DSL or cable connection if using anything more complicated than an xterm. RDP can do a whole Windows desktop over the same connection with a lot more responsiveness. Heck, even VNC beats X on lower speed connections, but I've never seen an application-level implementation of that.
Re:Poor Mattthew Garrett (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm glad we can just attack the messenger, and ignore the message.
Re:Uh yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course in the case of a router, or web server, the question is why someone would want to use VNC or X to configure it. It would make more sense in either case to build a web based UI and shove all the rendering out to the client in their web browser.