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  • #31
    Originally posted by chithanh View Post
    Business sense dictates that Red Hat and SUSE will support what their customers demand. If customers demand Mir, why should distributors refuse?
    What makes you think their customers will demand Mir? There are as many chances of them wanting to stick to X as there are for them wanting Mir or Wayland.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by chithanh View Post
      Business sense dictates that Red Hat and SUSE will support what their customers demand. If customers demand Mir, why should distributors refuse?
      First, their customers aren't demanding Mir. In fact, I believe that most of them will only really care that X support doesn't break, and anything beyond that will be fairly meaningless to them.

      Second, what their customers are really buying is support. The ability to call Red Hat up on the phone, tell them about something that is broken, and have an actual developer go into the code and fix it for them. Red Hat can't really provide that with Mir, at least not to the same degree, because Mir is controlled by Canonical. They don't have the ability to help shape the direction of the project, or even have commit access to fix bugs.

      If Wayland turns out to be a total and complete disaster, and Mir is a huge success, what you might see is Red Hat and others forking Mir into their own code that they could then run with however they want, but that seems extremely unlikely, for a lot of reasons. Including the GPL license and others. I'd say there's probably a better chance of them just giving up and returning to X full time than actually switching to Mir.

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      • #33
        I included all references for clarity.
        Originally posted by mrugiero View Post
        Originally posted by chithanh View Post
        Originally posted by energyman View Post
        Since neither RHEL nor SLES/SLED will use MIR.....
        Business sense dictates that Red Hat and SUSE will support what their customers demand. If customers demand Mir, why should distributors refuse?
        What makes you think their customers will demand Mir? There are as many chances of them wanting to stick to X as there are for them wanting Mir or Wayland.
        I did not claim that customers demand Mir. I just questioned the assertion that RHEL/SLED will not use it, and said that if customers demand Mir, then business sense dictates that it will be offered by Red Hat and SUSE. To put it in different words, any offering of Mir in commercial distros will hinge on customer demand.

        Another question is whether customers are going to demand Mir. Canonical already has AMD, NVidia and Valve(Steam) onboard. More specifically, how many developers are going to develop their Linux software for Ubuntu/Mir exclusively now, and how much their user base overlaps with Red Hat/SUSE customers.
        Canonical might try to pull a Chrome/Flash PPAPI style stunt (where the NPAPI Flash plugin is now security-bugfix-only mode, and only the PPAPI plugin receives new features), so that the X drivers enter maintenance mode and receive no new features. But that is only a very remote possibility.

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        • #34
          Originally posted by chithanh View Post
          Canonical already has AMD, NVidia and Valve(Steam) onboard.
          There is no evidence whatsoever to support that. AMD and NVidia have not taken official positions at all, but their primary focus is on workstations, which generally do not use Ubuntu. They do, however, commonly use Red Hat and SuSe, both of which seem to be aiming for Wayland. Valve has not made a statement on Mir at all, so far their focus has been exclusively on X11 and there is no indication that will change any time soon. They may never support either, relying on x-compatibility layers like XMIR and XWayland.

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          • #35
            Originally posted by chithanh View Post
            Canonical already has AMD, NVidia and Valve(Steam) onboard.
            They do? Last time i checked, AMD and NVidia haven't said a single thing about supporting Mir, and Valve explicitly said they wouldn't and were going to stick with X.

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            • #36
              Originally posted by chithanh View Post
              I included all references for clarity.
              I did not claim that customers demand Mir. I just questioned the assertion that RHEL/SLED will not use it, and said that if customers demand Mir, then business sense dictates that it will be offered by Red Hat and SUSE. To put it in different words, any offering of Mir in commercial distros will hinge on customer demand.

              Another question is whether customers are going to demand Mir. Canonical already has AMD, NVidia and Valve(Steam) onboard. More specifically, how many developers are going to develop their Linux software for Ubuntu/Mir exclusively now, and how much their user base overlaps with Red Hat/SUSE customers.
              Canonical might try to pull a Chrome/Flash PPAPI style stunt (where the NPAPI Flash plugin is now security-bugfix-only mode, and only the PPAPI plugin receives new features), so that the X drivers enter maintenance mode and receive no new features. But that is only a very remote possibility.
              I don't think business clients care about Steam at all, and I don't think Steam is that 'onboard' with Ubuntu, but with their own Linux-based console. And AMD and NVidia might be onboard with Mir, but they are still on board with X, too.
              Whatever Canonical do on their X side, is Canonical's. They can put the X drivers in maintenance mode all they want, but I seriously doubt NVidia and AMD will stick to that, the same way I doubt they'll put X drivers in maintenance mode because of Wayland. With their X drivers they don't support only Ubuntu, they support almost all of the server and business side, which doesn't limit to Linux (it's the majority, tho), but includes Solaris and BSDs, too. None of which are currently in a position to support Wayland or Mir.
              Also, from a business point of view, dropping anything because Canonical decides they should would be a bad choice. You get a fame of leaving clients in the cold because of a big company, and that's not a good reputation at all. If they feel the need to drop X, they'll do, but there is no way (assuming their management are in their minds) they'll drop anything because Canonical ask them to. They give support because this benefits their customers, which means they'll buy from them, not because they are onboard of anything.
              Also, AFAIR the Chrome/Flash PPAPI didn't came as a sort of Google petition to drop support for other browsers, but the opposite; Adobe said "well, this is it for Linux, good luck, guys" and THEN Google made an agreement to provide support for their own API.

              And about your clarification, I apologize, I misunderstood your post.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by smitty3268 View Post
                They do? Last time i checked, AMD and NVidia haven't said a single thing about supporting Mir, and Valve explicitly said they wouldn't and were going to stick with X.
                Valve/Steam may not directly care about Mir, but they now care about Ubuntu. Mir will be the primary graphics system for Ubuntu (so any graphics drivers need to work well with Mir), and Steam is very important to AMD and NVidia. Observe how the new-found love for Linux gaming performance from NVidia coincided with the announcement of Steam coming to Linux.
                Originally posted by mrugiero View Post
                I don't think business clients care about Steam at all,
                Whether business clients care about Steam or Mir depends on their business. If you are in the business to develop Games for Steam, then of course you do. If you are just running your corporate servers on RHEL, then not, but then you won't care about the X drivers either.

                When you are a Linux workstation customer then you probably do not care about Mir right now because all your software currently uses X. Ubuntu would have to grow in the workstation market for this to change.
                Originally posted by mrugiero View Post
                and I don't think Steam is that 'onboard' with Ubuntu, but with their own Linux-based console.
                Valve has been advertising Ubuntu in Steam, so I think the relationship between the two companies is already very close.

                Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubunt...e-322977.shtml
                Originally posted by mrugiero View Post
                And AMD and NVidia might be onboard with Mir, but they are still on board with X, too. Whatever Canonical do on their X side, is Canonical's. They can put the X drivers in maintenance mode all they want, but I seriously doubt NVidia and AMD will stick to that, the same way I doubt they'll put X drivers in maintenance mode because of Wayland. With their X drivers they don't support only Ubuntu, they support almost all of the server and business side, which doesn't limit to Linux (it's the majority, tho), but includes Solaris and BSDs, too. None of which are currently in a position to support Wayland or Mir.
                You are correct, and that is why I said it is only a very remote possibility. The Solaris and BSD workstation markets however are losing significance, and if X applications run well enough under Mir there might not be enough incentive to continue supporting X. The inertia of business customers is much larger than of consumers and so any change will probably not happen overnight as it did with Flash.

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                  Whether business clients care about Steam or Mir depends on their business. If you are in the business to develop Games for Steam, then of course you do. If you are just running your corporate servers on RHEL, then not, but then you won't care about the X drivers either.

                  When you are a Linux workstation customer then you probably do not care about Mir right now because all your software currently uses X. Ubuntu would have to grow in the workstation market for this to change.
                  If you are on that business, chances are you are already running something suitable for that, so it's still unlikely that any RHEL user will care about Steam.

                  Valve has been advertising Ubuntu in Steam, so I think the relationship between the two companies is already very close.

                  Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubunt...e-322977.shtml
                  I'm aware of that, but might just be getting free beta testing for the software side of their console. That alone justifies what is in that webpage.
                  Also, there is no statement from them in the Mir thing, since the statement is on the page from before Mir was announced. They might as well decide it's not comercially viable for them to support Mir. On the other hand, the whole Mir thing might have been partially based on Steam's needs (NOTE THIS IS ONLY MY SPECULATION, please don't assume this is founded on anything and start spreading FUD because of me). Also, it might be easier for Valve to just base their Linux on Ubuntu.
                  You are correct, and that is why I said it is only a very remote possibility. The Solaris and BSD workstation markets however are losing significance, and if X applications run well enough under Mir there might not be enough incentive to continue supporting X. The inertia of business customers is much larger than of consumers and so any change will probably not happen overnight as it did with Flash.
                  Fair enough.

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                  • #39
                    Some Red Hat / SUSE customers might have decided to start developing games for Steam following the announcement from Valve.

                    And even if Valve doesn't care about Mir at all in their code, they (and their graphics partners) will still have to deal with it because Ubuntu uses it as default graphics system.

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                    • #40
                      Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                      Some Red Hat / SUSE customers might have decided to start developing games for Steam following the announcement from Valve.

                      And even if Valve doesn't care about Mir at all in their code, they (and their graphics partners) will still have to deal with it because Ubuntu uses it as default graphics system.
                      Canonical has already said they will continue supporting X applications (through XMir). And their customers would not be very happy if they didn't. So no, Valve doesn't have to worry about Mir at all, they can continue targeting X and run on all distributions.

                      And Red Hat/SUSE customers aren't game developers. Those guys are all running windows. The ones that switch to linux are probably already on ubuntu anyway.

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