Ubuntu's Mir Moves Ahead With Unity 8 Interface

[Awesomeness]

More FUD.
Are you saying that any project controlled by a single entity inherently cannot be developed in a "distro-agnostic" way or is this just specific to Mir?
If the latter is the case, what specifically about Mir prevents it from being used in another Linux distribution?

Look up what FUD means. There is nothing uncertain or doubtful about it: Not a single piece of Canonical-produced software could simply be compiles on other distributions. Patches have always been necessary, eg. this one for indicator-appmenu because Canonical hardcodes paths:

https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file?expand=1&file=0001_Fix_dbusmenu-dumper_path.patch&package=indicator-appmenu&project=GNOME%3AAyatana

Canonical already has a QPA plugin for Qt and there is no conceivable reason why it won't be accepted upstream

There is a simple reason: Canonical never proposed it upstream.

[Andrecorreia]

mir or others

i don t care about mir or wayland, i want a good free SO with linux kernel, who will works ofc

[dee.]

i don t care about mir or wayland, i want a good free SO with linux kernel, who will works ofc

You want a significant other with a Linux kernel?

[intellivision]

Look up what FUD means. There is nothing uncertain or doubtful about it: Not a single piece of Canonical-produced software could simply be compiles on other distributions. Patches have always been necessary, eg. this one for indicator-appmenu because Canonical hardcodes paths:

https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file?expand=1&file=0001_Fix_dbusmenu-dumper_path.patch&package=indicator-appmenu&project=GNOME%3AAyatana

Considering that Mir is being ported to other platforms including Arch through AUR, I think that your theory might be a bit outdated.

[dee.]

GNome shell stupid design? Unity is good for you? hahaha please, don't joke, you are simply an ubuntu faggot fanboy and you don't have any argument for defend your opinions. I don't know any people in the real life, that use ubuntu or any other distro, ubuntu is a distro like others, and user friendly like others, but with more marketing. On linux nobody need to learn C for install a distro, pclinux os, sabayon, mageia,opensuse, etc, are all distro user friendly... I don't waste more time for debate with you, you are only a fanboy

Please stop helping.

[dee.]

The others will cooperate because Ubuntu is popular and not cooperating means being idiots. Right now the only thing in linux that has a chance on the desktop is Ubuntu. Some things they need to do themselves because the self serving community that you so much care about seems more interested in showing off their stupid design choices (yes gnome 3 I am talking about you) than actually satisfying the needs of actual computer users who don't want to use terminal and learn C just to be able to boot.

Plenty of distros there where you don't need to use the terminal. I know the Linux world might seem intimidating to you, and Ubuntu might seem like a safe haven, but if you really just open your eyes there's more stuff for you to see.

Are you really that high? No central authority? Hmmmm, I seem to remember this guy Linux Torvalds you might have heard of him, and Red Hat. There actually are a fiew really big corporations that make the bulk of linux code, not the basement rebels who think they are free.

So? The Linux kernel is just a part of what we know as desktop Linux. It's a lot more than that, and even then, the kernel is open source. If I want to make my own fork of the kernel, I can, as long as I abide by the GPL. The de-centralized nature is part of open source, it's hardcoded into it you could say.

Being de-centralized means that you can't shut down the operation by taking down the boss. Do you think Linux stops from existing if Linus dies? If Red Hat goes bankrupt? If Canonical kicks the bucket? Nope, it won't. Because as long as there's people willing to use it, and people willing to code it, it will keep on keeping on.

Windows is losing ground because they made a stupid mistake with the interface in Windows 8. Linux is becoming more popular because somebody made it useful on the desktop (hint: it starts with C and ends with anonical).

Canonical didn't do anything. Linux as a whole was becoming usable on the desktop thanks to many factors, many of them which Canonical couldn't have any influence on whatsoever. Things like drivers being available for most hardware (WiFi, graphics cards) had nothing to do with Canonical and Canonical had nothing to do with them.

Another example: Android. It got popular because Google made it. If they were to wait for your beloved open source ecosystem there would have been no Android on the phones in a million years. Again, centralized. And it worked like a charm.

Android has an open source ecosystem around it, albeit a small one. Besides, you're comparing apples to oranges. The mobile market is a totally different animal from desktop computers: there's no standardized hardware, practically no market for non-OEM-installed OS's, and nothing is compatible with each other. You can't make a single "smartphone binary" and expect it to install on any phone, you need different ISOs for different phones. Even so, Android's dominance is only temporary, as there are going to be other contenders on the market (Tizen, Sailfish, Firefox, even your beloved Ubuntu) and the smartphone market is still growing, which means there's plenty of room for a couple more smartphone OS's.

Or, since people hate choice more like there will be only one that will hold that majority... Ubuntu for example. Stop hallucinating with the strong healthy interoperable distros, nobody is playing nice with others, everyone of them has particularities that make it hard to run things on others. Hell there is no interoperable package system and you say that there will be cross compatibility among distros. Maybe in a few hundred years.

No interoperable package system? Right, because Ubuntu messes up compatibility and refuses to work with the upstream like proper distros. Not counting Ubuntu and its derivatives, deb packages work on any deb system. Besides, interoperability works just fine. I can run a GTK app in any distro. I can download the tarball for a program, get the necessary deps, run make && make install and it will compile just the same on any distro. There's plenty of interoperability right there. Even the standards that ensure that the same software works in whatever desktop environment or window manager you use count as interoperability.

Where where? Give me a major distro that comes with wayland by default!

Rebecca Black Linux. Also, there are already games using wayland libraries, and it's already being used in some embedded applications.

Even if Mir end up inferior it will run on both phones and desktops. Canonical will push for it and they seem to have some connections with the big players. What you don't understand is that not the best from the tehnical point of view wins. Most of the times politics win. That's how it is in the real world and that is how it is even in the geeky linux world of people who say they hate politics and try to hide from it because they suck at it. As you might have noticed power isn't gathered by the brightest or best or whatever but by those who know how to play the game. Canonical is better at this and have lot of money to use in order to impose their view. You may not like it but unless you're a multimillionaire you'll just learn to play along nicely. Canonical has been founded by Shuttleworth. Because he is rich. How exactly are you gonna counter that? Ubuntu is here to stay. And yes they have enough political power to impose their views if necessary. Right now I think their views reflect the needs of the users better than what the 'community' came up with lately. So them forcing others is actually doing the end users a service. And those are the only ones that matter. Especially if you want to solve bug #1.

Oh, I see. Ubuntu will win because your daddy has more money than my daddy. Now it all makes sense!

Incidentally, why are you so angry all the time?

[smitty3268]

Some possible downsides of Mir

Or, why KDE isn't supporting Mir.

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/mir-in-kubuntu/

Distro specific

So far Mir is a one-distribution solution. So far no other distribution has shown any interest in packaging Mir even if it would become a working solution. Unfortunately I don?t have the ability to see into the future, but I can use the past and the present to get ideas for the future. The past tells me that there are other Canonical specific solutions which are not available in other distributions. I do not know of any distribution which packages Unity and from all I have heard it?s even impossible to package Unity on non-Ubuntu distributions. Given that it is quite likely that Mir will go the same road. It?s designed as a solution for Unity and if distros don?t package Unity there is no need to package Mir.

This has quite some influence on a possible adoption. I do not know of any kde-workspace developer using (K)Ubuntu. I do not see how anyone would work on it or how we should be able to review code or even maintain code. It would mean all the adoption would have to go into ifdef sections nobody compiles and nobody runs. This is the best way to ensure that it starts to bit-rot. Even more our CI system runs on openSUSE so not even the CI would be able to detect breakage. Of course a downstream like Kubuntu could develop the adoption and carry it as a patch on top of upstream, but I would highly recommend them to not do this as KWin?s source code churn is too high. Also we all agree that downstream patches are evil and we would no longer be able to help in any way downstream?s user from a support perspective.

Architecture

Mir?s architecture is centered around Unity. It is difficult to really understand the architecture of Mir as the specification is so full of buzz-words that I don?t understand it [5]. From all I can see and understand Unity Next is a combination of window manager and desktop shell implemented on top of Mir. How exactly this is going to look like I do not know. Anyway it does not fit our design of having desktop shell and window manager separated and we do not know whether Mir would support that. We also do not know whether Mir would allow any other desktop shell except Unity Next, given that this is the main target. Wayland on the other hand is designed to have more than one compositor implementations. Using KWin as a session compositor is an example in the spec.

License

Wayland is licensed like X under the MIT license, which served us well for a display server. I think this is a very good choice and I am glad that the Wayland developers decided for this license. Mir is licensed under GPLv3-only with CLA. I think this is very unsuited for such a part of the stack and would render quite a risk for usage in KDE Plasma. KWin (and most KDE software) is GPLv2-or-later, this would no longer be possible, it would turn our code into GPLv3-only as KWin (or any other software which would depend on mir-server) would be a derived work of Mir. I do not consider GPLv3-only software as a possible dependency of any core part of our application stack. It renders a serious threat for the future in case of a GPLv4 which is not compatible with GPLv3. I also dislike the CLA [6]. So from a licensing perspective Mir is hardly acceptable.

Unity Specific/No Protocol

One of the most important aspects from Wayland for us is the ability to extend the protocol. This has already been a quite important feature in X and we are using our own extensions over ICCCM and EWMH to implement additional functionality. Of course our workspace has own ideas and it is important for us to be able to ?standardize? those and also make them available to others if they are interested. This is possible thanks to protocol extensions.
Mir doesn?t have a real protocol. The ?inner core? is described as ?protocol-agnostic?. This renders a problem to us if we would want to use it. Our architecture is different (as described above) and we need a protocol between the desktop shell and the compositor. If Mir doesn?t provide that we would need to use our own protocol. And that already exists, it is called ?Wayland?. So even if we would support Mir, we would need the Wayland protocol?!? That doesn?t make any sense to me. If we need to run Wayland on top of Mir just to get the features we need, why should we run Mir at all?

But it gets worse, the protocol between Mir server and Mir clients is defined as not being stable. In fact it?s promised that it will break. That?s a huge problem, I would even call it a showstopper. For Canonical that?s fine ? they control the complete stack and can just adjust all bits using the protocol like QMir.

For us this looks quite different. Given that the protocol may change any time and given that the whole thing is developed for the needs of Unity we have to expect that the server libraries are not binary compatible or that old version of the server libraries cannot talk with the latest client libraries. We would constantly have to develop against an unstable and breaking base. I know that this sounds overly pessimistic but I know of one case where a change got introduced in a Canonical protocol late in the release cycle completely breaking an application in Kubuntu which wanted to use the protocol. Given this experience I would not trust that the protocol doesn?t change one day before the release meaning that Kubuntu cannot ship.

This is not awesome, it?s awful. It means KWin will not work just fine on Mir.

I hope this shows that using Mir inside the KDE Plasma workspaces is not an option. There are no advantages which would turn Mir into a better solution than Wayland and at the same time there are several showstoppers which mean that we cannot integrate Mir ? not even optionally in addition to Wayland. The unstable protocol and the licensing choice are clearly not acceptable.

[sacridex]

Wishing for things really hard will not make them true...

No, but facts do!
Ubuntu is THE Linux Distribution with major market share and Valve would be stupid not to support it.
Pls go home troll.

[valeriodean]

LOL

The funniest part is the following...

Mir doesn?t have a real protocol. The ?inner core? is described as ?protocol-agnostic?. This renders a problem to us if we would want to use it. Our architecture is different (as described above) and we need a protocol between the desktop shell and the compositor. If Mir doesn?t provide that we would need to use our own protocol. And that already exists, it is called ?Wayland?. So even if we would support Mir, we would need the Wayland protocol?!? That doesn?t make any sense to me. If we need to run Wayland on top of Mir just to get the features we need, why should we run Mir at all?

If Mir doesn?t provide that we would need to use our own protocol. And that already exists, it is called ?Wayland?.
ROFL

[pandev92]

No, but facts do!
Ubuntu is THE Linux Distribution with major market share and Valve would be stupid not to support it.
Pls go home troll.

Valve support linux because they want to do a Linux game console, nothing more..., nvidia and amd drivers are developed because nvidia and amd thinking on companies that working with linux, with virtualization, etc, and in this field, red hat had the very market share. This is the same reason because nvidia support freebsd.