Ubuntu's Mir Moves Ahead With Unity 8 Interface

[pandev92]

So if somebody hacks together 20 lines of code to keep Mir together with band aids will that make you happy? That thing is unusable stop pointing it out as an example o wayland implementation. It doesn't exist. Read the download page (which by the way has nothing to download from):

WARNING: This is pre-alpha quality work this means it's highly unstable and work in progress, its main purpose is to let you test the Maui system early, see how your hardware works with Wayland. This image won't run on VirtualBox (no EGL support) and requires kms/drm supported hardware.

BEWARE: it's been reported that kms support doesn't work on a number of GPUs from AMD, NVIDIA and VMware. On Intel everything seems fine although it has been confirmed only for Intel HD2000 and HD3000.

Wayland support on Qt 5.x needs more work but it's getting there, it has client side decorations and menus work a lot better than the last month. Complete support for Qt applications on Wayland is expected for Qt 5.1, not much will happen for Qt and QML compositors until Qt 5.2. The work currently being done on qtwayland is tested on Weston, this is why it was included in the live image.

GTK+ 3 on the other hand has still Wayland incomplete (no window decorations) support.

It's bullshit in this state. Total bullshit. Hacking together 20 LOC doesn't make an usable distro.

anyone say that wayland is usable, we say that wayland is on state more advanced than mir, qt 5 and gtk soon will run perfectly on wayland, gnome 3.10, wil have the first support for wayland, kde are working o wayland, and mir? we not saw anything about mir, no demo's on a pc, only mobiles phones, anything.

[IsacDaavid]

So lame

It has been pointed out before, Canonical fails because their involvement with upstream sources is negligible, even Microsoft's voice is given more attention in the Linux kernel development. Their immature and often harmful pseudo-innovative projects like Unity and Mir depend on a plethora of more relevant projects (GNU, Linux, Android/CyanogenMod, Debian, GNOME (hence Red Hat), still X, Compiz, now Qt, an so on). They can't make anything big on their own! Like a little child, Canonical requires the blessing of all of these step-parents in order to go, and their relationship just gets worse. Ubuntu has always desperately strived to give FOSS a piece of the cake, but with their recent behaviour it becomes clearer they are doing it the wrong, stupid way. Choice is good, and forking is sometimes the only option though usually undesired (thanks free software for the former and copyleft for promoting upstream cooperation instead of forking), but please, don't feed Ubuntu-Canonical, they are fragmentation trolls.

It doesn't matter whether it's the most popular distro out there (that's also controversial) nor whether it is backed by a billionaire, it still has ways to go from being considered mainstream; and the combined effort of sane GNU/Linux distros, the rest of the FOSS community and involved companies outperforms Canonical's. At least all KDE-based and GNOME-based distros will be using Wayland. That's why Wayland will own Mir. Don't you believe me? Go compare the adoption of systemd vs upstart, or Unity vs others.

Ubuntu for phones is the thing that disappoints me the most, it could have been a nice advancement from the good-but-not-perfect Android towards real mobile computing for power users.

[dee.]

I'm not angry. It's just interesting to see how people try to minimize Canonical's importance after they popularized Linux. You basically bite the hand that fed you. Linux on the desktop is where it is because of Canonical.

You sound very angry. Maybe you should try to calm down a bit and think about things rationally?

Ubuntu still has better polish and works better out of the box. For example fedora is nowhere near as usable.

Polish? Well yeah, if you call that horrible bright orange vomit all over the screen polish... first thing I did on Ubuntu was to change away that horrible orange to something more aesthetically pleasant (and Ubuntu doesn't make that easy, you need 3rd party software to change such elementary things... with Ubuntu, it's always "daddy knows best").

Nah, there are distros with better polish. Mint and Opensuse come to mind. The latest Opensuse looks very pretty, I have to say, even though I don't use the distro myself.

Even more fragmentation that will sure help the ecosystem. GPL allows something that isn't necessary for the better of the system.

What fragmentation? There are already custom kernels that are in most cases totally compatible and can be used in any linux distro. I don't think you understand much about how the Linux kernel actually works...

Linux won't stop but it will be pretty badly hit and return to the dark ages. The same you could say about Microsoft. If Gates dies or the lead dev for windows dies windows won't die don't worry about that. Hell even if Microsoft will go bankrupt some other company will take over Windows. Nobody will let that cash cow die easily.

WHEN Microsoft goes bankrupt, no one will want to touch windows - why would they? It'd be more trouble than it's worth, anyone with the resources to maintain their own OS at that point would rather use Linux or BSD, and if winsnooze still were a cash cow at that point, MS wouldn't have gone bankrupt in the first place.

If Canonical goes away, nothing much at all happens - people who want to still use Ubuntu can pick up the development, other distros will still flourish just the same. Canonical doesn't bring much to the other distros, and now that they started messing about with Mir, they arguably aren't going to bring much to the table for Ubuntu either. They're making Ubuntu a separate entity from Real Linux distros.

They actually did a lot. Influenced a lot o players to be nicer with linux by using Shuttleworth's $$$. Also, marketing. Tons of marketing. Really important these days. Don't only think in terms of lines of code written.

Yeah, that's all Canonical seems to be capable of these days. Marketing and vaporware. When can I buy a Ubuntu TV?

Android and iOS will continue to dominate the landscape. They have enough power to ensure that. This type of basement rebel that takes over the world doesn't actually happen except in movies.

Pfffffthahaha... oh wow. Man. You're like a one man comedy show.

You might have heard of this one "basement rebel" who started programming his own kernel in the early 90s? He first posted about it on Usenet, saying how it's a hobby project, and probably never will be ported to anything beside the 80386. Know who that guy was?

It was Linus Torvalds. That hobby project, made alone by this basement rebel? It was the Linux kernel. (cue dramatic music!)

You might have heard of another basement dwellere: Bill Gates, who started his computer hobby in the 60s by selling software he and his friends made out of his garage. Oh yeah, another basement dweller: Steve Jobs.

All this is pretty much beside the point, because if you knew even the first things about the mobile market, if you had done even cursory research, you would know how utterly silly your arguments are. None of the OSs that I mentioned (Tizen, Sailfish and Firefox OS) are being developed by "basement rebels". They're all being backed by corporations that I'm pretty sure are larger than Canonical (well, Mozilla isn't a corporation, but still) and have more money at hand than Shuttleworth. Tizen is being developed by Intel, among others. Firefox is pretty obvious. Sailfish is a continuation of Meego, being developed by former Meego devs who escaped from Nokia when it was usurped by the trojan horse of MS. Also guess what? It will use Wayland. As will Tizen. Not Mir, not surfaceflinger, not X. Wayland.

And as for the idea that "Android and ios will forever dominate the market"... please. You are so clueless it HURTS. First of all, the smartphone market is nowhere near market saturation yet. Only about half of the phones in the world are smartphones, which means the smartphone market has room to grow about 100%. Meaning, it will double during the next decade, when dumbphones inevitably will be phased out. And that means that there is more than enough room for new players in the market. It is very much likely that Sailfish or Tizen will be able to grab a sizeable chunk of the mid-high-range mobile phones, whereas Firefox will be very likely to grab a sizeable chunk of the low-end market.

Ubuntu phone also has a shot, I guess, if they manage to get some hardware with preinstalls. Also they have to get on the market on time. If they drag their feet with this, they're going to fail. That's why Mir is very risky for them, it would have been again better to use wayland or even stick with surfaceflinger - at least that way they could be sure to get a working display server in time. Now if Mir doesn't get finished on time, Ubuntu will lose the early start it needs to succeed on mobile.

There still are tons of bugs at the interaction level. GTK applications that don't look or function well in KDE etc. Ubuntu it's just pushing forward really fast and doesn't waste time with making it up for everybody. They are like the scouts. They scout ahead deep in the enemy lines and don't wait for the whole army. After they make serious inroads they wait for others to catch up with them. They experiment a lot. A lot of trial and error. Not everything needs to go upstream.

GTK apps work on KDE. Who cares if they don't look quite up to par? That they work is still a good achievement from two entirely different desktop environments. It's a lot more than you get on proprietary systems.

Canonical has appointed themselves as a leader of linux desktop, but if no one recognizes your authority to lead, your position is only a paper tiger. Trust and leadership needs to be earned, and Canonical has violated that trust, by selling user keystrokes to Amazon and stuff like that.

For real? That's the best that you could come up with. That distro doesn't even exist. Nobody is using it. If that represents the might of wayland excuse me while I laugh to tears.

You seem to claim a lot of things don't exist. You might want to see a psychiatrist, that's a pretty severe form of denial right there...

Well they do have a lot of money to push their solution so it's likely it will win. Stop thinking that just because a solution is tehnically superior it will necessary win. History doesn't support that idea. Everybody likes to think about how great Linux is compared to Windows and how better the kernel is, but right now nothing in linux is close to dethroning windows when it comes to usability and number of applications available. Hell the linux kernel is so great and the video drivers are so great that I can't even get a smooth animation in the DE. And when the system is under heavy load and thrashing I get the mouse icon to stutter. Those things don't happen in windows. Linux boasts how it's better separated and layered but these things don't always help. The integration of the kernel with a lot of the desktop makes Windows experience much smoother but of course with other costs.

Ok what is this I don't even... I don't get any mouse stutters or anything. The only time I get any lag on the video is when I run a litecoin miner, which takes up all the GPU resources it can get its paws on. Maybe you've messed up your system somehow? Or maybe it's because of the shoddy coding of Unity...

And it's totally unfair to compare the situation to that of windows. When you buy a windows computer, the computer comes preinstalled with an OEM version of windows, with all the appropriate drivers for the hardware. The same is true if you buy hardware with linux preinstalled - you will also get that everything-works-out-of-the-box functionality there. If you install a non-OEM version of windows without all the OEM drivers, you're very likely to get similar problems you can get on Linux. And all this mostly applies to laptops - on most desktop hardware, there hasn't been any compatibility problems or other problems on Linux for ages.

[valeriodean]

Total bullshit. Hacking together 20 LOC doesn't make an usable distro.

Wait a minute, why you are speaking so bad about ubuntu? :-)

[TheOne]

Round Three

Fight!

Flawless Victory!

[pandev92]

It must really hurt for you to know that Ubuntu is the most popular distro.

windows is the most popular OS in the world, and is a techonlogical shit, What do you want me understand with that?

And , continue to use the most ridicolous "DE" (unity)with the most crappy compositor(compiz), other distros don't need this kind of users

[renox]

windows is the most popular OS in the world, and is a techonlogical shit, What do you want me understand with that?

That backward compatibility, something that Windows does quite well, is really important?
Not that this is related to Ubuntu..

[GreatEmerald]

That backward compatibility, something that Windows does quite well, is really important?
Not that this is related to Ubuntu..

One man's backwards compatibility is another man's cruft. Also, Linux doesn't have that poor backwards compatibility ? after all, games from 2003 (and IIRC earlier as well, but it's been a while since I tested those) still work just fine these days, due to bundled libraries and setarch (linux32). Due to everything being OSS, you can also build all of the previous libraries from source by using git and whatnot, in case they were not included.

[dee.]

The development will continue but much slower. And again marketing is crucial. In fact I just heard that for a product 75% of the success in the market is done by good advertising. If the only thing that Canonical did was marketing and it would still be great.

How much does Canonical actually do for Linux development? All the marketing in the world doesn't help if you have an inferior product. Microsoft just put billions in the marketing of windows 8 and it still flopped, because it's a piece of shit. Marketing doesn't solve your problems if your product is crap. Not anymore, maybe in the past - but nowdays, we got the internet, which changed the game. Maybe you've heard of it...

Linux kernel is now pretty much owned by Red Hat. Sure you can say that Torvalds started it but pretty fast some big corporations entered into play.

Hahahaha... oh wow. So clueless

Red hat doesn't get to dictate any stuff with the kernel. If Linus says "we're not doing that" then Red hat has no choice but to suck it. The same as every other corporation involved in Linux development. So no. It's the users who run Linux. Linux is all about doing what's best for the users, corporate interests come secondary to user freedom. That is the entire point of Linux. That is why it's better than winsnows or macaroni os.

Gates actually started making money when his mother who was a pretty important person in IBM made the connections necessary for him to actually have a market for DOS.

Jobs got an early investment from a rich guy forgot his name, the third person in the company beside Jobs and Wozniak.

None of these guys actually got any power by being in a basement. In fact you will find out they were pretty political types of guys and quite pragmatic in their approach. Nowhere near anything your idealistic rants.

Bullshit. They started their career in the basement. Doesn't matter what happened afterwards. They got investment, they got money, sure, later on. But that wouldn't have happened if they hadn't innovated.

A whole shitton of innovation goes on in basements which you so deride. In some cases, being a big corporate only hurts innovation, as it makes you too large, too hindered by bureaucracy, too slow and set in your ways to move quickly enough, too much infrastructure to truly take risks and innovate. Big corporations tend to become lazy and complacent, because they have too much to lose.

Bitcoin wasn't invented by a corporation, and it's going to be the biggest game changer we've seen since the steam engine. Maybe even bigger. And it's never going to get controlled by a corporation, because it's a distributed, decentralized monetary system. Better buy now when the price is still low, if you want to invest in your future (hint hint). And that's actually something that will benefit open source -we're going to get a whole new batch of millionaires (billionaires, even) who have open source ideals close to heart - we already have bitcoin millionaires who are basically geeks who just got in very early in the game. But think of all that loose capital that just screams to be invested in geeky projects, open source, open hardware... the future looks interesting, and all that without surrendering control to your beloved corporations.

For real man? Tell me how many people use that distro. It must be in the millions since it's so popular.

Doesn't matter, that wasn't the point.

The only persons that matters cares. The user.

Irrelevant, GTK apps are not meant for KDE, KDE apps are not meant for GTK, in that perspective it's a good achievement they work together at all.

I might have expressed myself wrong. I wanted to say if Microsoft goes down from something stupid or wrong, I don't know, like they start making really bad businesses that drive them to bankruptcy while Windows is still a viable platform. Not if Windows is no longer wanted by the market. In this case I think others will fight to get their hands on Windows and continue the development.

Not likely. Windows would still likely sink with the ship. Because it's more complicated than that - there's patents, particularly software patents, involved. And who's going to maintain that pile of spaghetti code? With a totally new batch of people, who're unfamiliar with the code, it's much more efficient to start over with a clean codebase.

Yes Mint is good but it's based on Ubuntu and OpenSuse the latest version that just appeared I almost gave a try. Sure things are getting there even with others but Canonical got there first and created this trend of polish if you want to call it like that. What I don't like at OpenSuse is that RPM and it seems it's not as well supported by software makers and there are less packages than in Ubuntu. I may be wrong though, that is what I read from other people.

Doesn't really matter, you can always compile from source - I like to do that anyway for software I use a lot, because I get to use -march=native and stuff to squeeze out a bit more performance. And Mint also has a Debian version. Mint would survive even without Ubuntu, in a tight spot, they could feasibly fork all Ubuntu-specific packages and maintain them themselves.

Exactly. None of those OSes are being developed by small companies. Exactly my point. They are open source only in name. Try contributing to them and see how long does it take to actually integrate patches in their mainlines.

Can't be open source "in name only". No such thing. Android uses the same model, Google doesn't accept patches either, and it's still open source, because people can take the code and fork it freely if they wish - that's how we got cyanogenmod, and how we got the ubuntu phone os which was based on cyanogen.

Besides, all of these OS's have plenty of code that DO accept patches. They're actually more open in that regard than Android, which is totally under Google control. Particularly Firefox OS.

Also, Mozilla is not a company at all. They're an organization.

Android and iOS have a good chunk of the market. They also have tons of money. Do you think they will just let the others achieve dominance? People are already familiar with both of them. That is basically the reason Windows still commands the market. People are already used to it. People hate trying new unproven things. Only a spectacular product combined with stellar marketing might have a chance. Along with billions of dollars that are required for both.

Again with this. You seem to think that whoever has the most money automatically wins. If so, why do you bother with Ubuntu, you should stick with Windows because it's the most popular and has the most money behind it, so by your logic it should win.

Oh but wait, despite all that money, microsoft hasn't managed to get above 4% market share on the mobile. HMMM.

And iOS used to be market leader, with all that apple money behind them - how did Android, the underdog, manage to get so far ahead? HMMMM.

You're simply ignoring what I'm saying. There are untapped markets here, that aren't properly addressed by either Apple nor Android. That's where Firefox OS, and either Sailfish or Tizen come in. They're more than likely going to tap those markets. Ubuntu may have a chance, again, depending if they get their act together in time.

You need 3rd party software to change the desktop background? I don't use that orange background and didn't need anything to change that. Just go to appearance. Plus nobody is forcing you to use Unity. Until 4 days ago I was a happy KDE user and before that Gnome user and before that xfce user.

If only the background was the only place with it. That orange shit is everywhere - all the mouse highlights in menus and stuff, the dash and the sidebar... all things you need 3rd party software to change, because Ubuntu thinks their way works for everyone and customizability is "too complicated" for their target demographic...

It's not because of Unity. It has nothing to do with the DE. It has to do with the fact that the kernel is separated from the DE and doesn't know not to move the mouse icon to the HDD when memory becomes scarce (X windows system isn't locked in memory). And stuttering while copying large files is a bug known from 2008 and nothing has been done to substantially improve the issue. The don't seem to really care about the desktop and most decisions go to improve performance on the servers. It might also have something to do with the kernel scheduler from what I read but I don't know.

Get more RAM. It's 2013.

And yet you hate canonical when they try to pull the same stunt with Ubuntu coming preinstalled to avoid those same issues. And yes it's unfair I know but I don't care about fairness so much and most users don't either. They will stick to Windows since it just works while Linux in the unfair position doesn't. You can't argue that it's unfair that Microsoft has billions in the bank while linux doesn't.

No, I don't hate Canonical. I wish they would snap out of this hubris and stupidity they have descended to recently, but I don't actualyl wish for them to fail. I wish they'd get their act together and start making smart decisions, start respecting their users, stop thinking in short term and start collaborating with others to build a healthy ecosystem, a healthy base for a future Linux desktop... but that might be too much to ask with a megalomaniac like Shuttleworth at helm, so I'm left to hope that some other distro manages to fulfill these goals. And it will happen eventually, there's enough of an economic incentive there, that sooner or later it will be done. When new money starts flowing in, when the economic forces eventually break that dam, someone is going to do this, and then we'll see the Linux desktop rise to greatness. So I'm not worried.

[GreatEmerald]

What I don't like at OpenSuse is that RPM and it seems it's not as well supported by software makers and there are less packages than in Ubuntu. I may be wrong though, that is what I read from other people.

Yes, you are wrong:

openSUSE Build Service hosts 31682 projects, with 208558 packages, in 43582 repositories and is used by 35771 confirmed developers.

Exactly. None of those OSes are being developed by small companies. Exactly my point. They are open source only in name. Try contributing to them and see how long does it take to actually integrate patches in their mainlines.

Let's see... It took a total of 3 days between the time I reported a bug (or, rather, a lack of a feature) in openSUSE's snapper and the time it got fixed in mainline; I wrote a patch two days after I wrote the bug report, so overall it took no more than a day for the patch to get integrated.