Intel Reverts Plans, Will Not Support Ubuntu's XMir

[Sonadow]

Canonical finally shows its true colours:

the only thing that would make us ditch Mir and go with Wayland is if Wayland were to be a better technical option for us. Doesn't matter how popular it is, or how "standard" it is, if it's not better for us we're not going to use it.

[chrisb]

Because it is irrelevant. Any software should run on any DE without extra maintenance.

Sometimes, but not really. What you say would be true if an application only interacted with the desktop to open windows. But these days desktops do a lot more - desktop search, storing contacts lists, storing email, IM, call histories, accessibility details, encryption keys and passwords, recent documents, copy paste of complex data types etc. Any time an app developer relies on functionality that is in Gnome or KDE libs that a) isn't merely displaying a graphical widget, and b) hasn't been standardised, then that functionality will not work across desktops. Being able to load a KDE IM app in Gnome isn't much use if it looks for contacts in kaddressbook instead of the Gnome equivalent.

[dee.]

Mint's primary claim to fame is being a niche for people who want to run Gnome forks Cinnamon/Mate. I think in the long term Gnome will get it's act together, fix the problems, maybe adopt some of the popular bits of Cinnamon, and people (Fedora) will choose it over the forks. RedHat at least have motivation to spend money and make this happen.

Funny that people don't complain about fragmentation when it comes to Gnome forks...

Cinnamon is actually in the process of diverging from GNOME, the next version (2.0) will no longer use a GNOME-backend but will be its own thing.

As for GNOME adopting the changes made by Cinnamon to their upstream, there is absolutely no evidence of this happening, not even any talk by GNOME devs of doing such a thing. They're doing their own thing, Cinnamon does their own. Cinnamon may have started as a variant/fork of GNOME, but is increasingly becoming its own thing. Yes, they will have some things in common with GNOME, but conceptually they're entirely different, and they'll be relying on their own codebase soon enough.

As for fragmentation, I never complain about fragmentation. The reason I think Mir is a horrible idea is not because of "fragmentation" but because of more practical reasons. It's also extremely disingenuous and borderline dishonest to compare such fundamentally different parts of the stack as display servers and desktop environments.

[dee.]

You see how getting <100 lines of code into the driver went for them? Could you imagine trying to get features they needed in Wayland would have gone? What happens when a product gets pushed back because some jerk living in his parent's basement in Romania doesn't like an essential <100 line patch from them? Investors can't depended on the whim of basement dwellers in Romania when investing. A company needs some control of their products as well. This is why opensource and business have a hardtime getting along.

Has every ubuntu fan now given their account password to bozley? Sheesh... the amount of stupidity here sometimes.

[dee.]

FFS, Mir vs Wayland happens at toolkit level, anyway. Nobody has to ever care about Wayland vs Mir other than GTK and Qt. They are the only ones doing the extra friggin work for it.

Incorrect, not all applications use toolkits, some need direct access to display server. Look at XBMC which had to develop separate backends for Mir & Wayland.

I would argue that Ubuntu is probably the only thing closest to Intel entering the mobile market. Tizen? never cared about it and never will. Ubuntu Phone + Desktop Dock? It's probably the only chance where Intel is a lot superior than ARM.

The patch was a mere buffer redirect from the video driver to mir, it just gave a major boost.

This is the problem with Ubuntu fans, they live in such a small bubble and think Canonical is the greatest company on earth - to the extent that someone here already compared Intel (one of the largest processor manufacturers, a company the size of 1000 Canonicals) with "basement dwellers" because they didn't accept a Canonical patch. How detached from reality can you get...

Tizen has the backing of both Intel + Samsung, it's one of the new mobile OS's that has the biggest chance of success. Samsung backs it to use it in smartphones, and maybe tablets, car manufacturers want to put it in IVI systems, and Intel wants to make Ultrabooks with Tizen OS. That's going to be huge, and a good thing for Linux. That's something Canonical can only dream about at this point.

I'm all for Canonical succeeding with their phone idea, but it doesn't really look like they're doing a very good job at it so far. We're still waiting for the Ubuntu TVs...

[dee.]

You are correct, I have not read the entire discussion. Does not change anything. Intel first added support for Canonical's display server alternative upstream, then removes it on *political grounds*: "We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen". It has QQ all over it. Would it be difficult for them to keep and maintain it on technical grounds ? They don't have any obligation to do so, but why not accept some competition and Mir as a *possible alternative* for next-gen-Linux graphics ?

Because Mir is NOT a "possible alternative for next-gen Linux graphics". Mir is the "possible alternative for next-gen UBUNTU graphics". It's designed to run on Ubuntu and support Unity only. The design choices made by Canonical and their development model guarantee that no other DE is going to adopt Mir, especially when there is already Wayland which is much more suitable for anyone non-Canonical. It's simply not feasible in any way for any other DE to adopt Mir, and if DE's don't support it, there's no reason for any distro to, either.

Mir is a one-distro solution, designed as such and will always stay as such (unless and until it one day becomes a zero-distro solution, if Canonical wises up and goes back to Wayland).

[chrisb]

A brand new day, a brand new FOSS drama

The arguments are old though. Shuttleworth (2011) "I think dual licensing is very important, and to be encouraged. So I think it?s important that Canonical set an example of being willing to do so, and in the process, be willing to take heat from those who think this is bad practice."

Stallman (2010) "Selling exceptions means that the copyright holder of the code releases it to the public under a free software license, then lets customers pay for permission to use the same code under different terms, for instance allowing its inclusion in proprietary applications... I consider selling exceptions an acceptable thing for a company to do, and I will suggest it where appropriate as a way to get programs freed."

[chrisb]

Because Mir is NOT a "possible alternative for next-gen Linux graphics". Mir is the "possible alternative for next-gen UBUNTU graphics". It's designed to run on Ubuntu and support Unity only. The design choices made by Canonical and their development model guarantee that no other DE is going to adopt Mir, especially when there is already Wayland which is much more suitable for anyone non-Canonical. It's simply not feasible in any way for any other DE to adopt Mir, and if DE's don't support it, there's no reason for any distro to, either.

Mir is a one-distro solution, designed as such and will always stay as such (unless and until it one day becomes a zero-distro solution, if Canonical wises up and goes back to Wayland).

People have been working on getting Unity and Mir packaged on Debian. Latest reports are that it runs fine. Debian bug #609278

[johnc]

Tizen has the backing of both Intel + Samsung, it's one of the new mobile OS's that has the biggest chance of success. Samsung backs it to use it in smartphones, and maybe tablets, car manufacturers want to put it in IVI systems, and Intel wants to make Ultrabooks with Tizen OS. That's going to be huge, and a good thing for Linux. That's something Canonical can only dream about at this point.

The last thing we want is Intel having any success in the mobile market. Before you know it they'll push everyone else out and then charge $300 for a mobile CPU.

[talvik]

People have been working on getting Unity and Mir packaged on Debian. Latest reports are that it runs fine. Debian bug #609278

This is the worst example possible. For Mir/Unity to run on Debian, you would have to use the Canonical patched Qt, GTK, mesa, noveaua, radeon, compiz, gnome libs... you have to replace so many packages that you'd have to essentially turn Debian to Ubuntu to run Unity.

The same goes for Ubuntu Software Center and Ubuntu One. The moment I discovered I couldn't get Ubuntu One on debian, I ditched One.

That bug is from January 2011. The last port is from January 2013: "Building the entire thing was a real PITA... And this definitely cannot be done by a single person. So are people interested and willing to take it further ???" So no it's not working, it's a partially working build.
edit: It's a port of Unity without Mir. If they couldn't port unity, they certainly won't with Mir