Mir Display Server Now Supports VT Switching

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mir Display Server Now Supports VT Switching

While there was the video of Unity Next running on Mir with a Google Nexus 4 hand-held, in terms of the overall feature completeness of the Mir Display Server, there is still much work ahead. Only on Friday did Mir even gain support for switching to virtual terminals...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM1MDk

[Darxus]

Wayland has not won anything yet. X is still around after 30 years and many wayland like projects to replace X, and i bet 10 years from now we will be still using it.

Previous attempts to replace X (Berlin/Fresco, the Y Window System) were critically lacking backward compatibility with X, which Wayland has (actually running a full instance of X.org rootless, when necessary). Also, as far as I can tell, everyone working on X *wants* Wayland to replace it, and many of them are working on Wayland to achieve that. The most prominent Wayland developers, including krh, have a substantial history as X developers.

I do hope in 10 years X will still be entirely usable, because I don't think there is reason to discard that functionality.

[Rallos Zek]

Rooting for Mir to beat Wayland is like rooting for the Russians to beat the USA to the moon in 2013. Wayland already won.

Weston supported something as simple as VT switching for years, and Xorg before that. It's not an innovative feature at all, in fact, when I tested Mir a while ago, I laughed at the fact that when I started it, and tried to switch TTYs, it would hijack the TTY, and not stay confined to the TTY I started it in, despite it being 9 months old... This article is more or less news that Mir hasn't been supporting such a feature UNTIL NOW!

Mir is FAR behind Wayland. Grab a Wayland Live CD, and try a MIR PPA, and then find out which one is leading the way.

Hint: It's the one that's not Mir

Wayland has not won anything yet. X is still around after 30 years and many wayland like projects to replace X, and i bet 10 years from now we will be still using it.

[Teho]

How would the experience change?

At least they could easily upgrade and test developement releases of EFL and such as there would be continuous testing for Mir. But seriously, I don't feel strongly about the subject.

[TheBlackCat]

I think it's more about providing the best possible experience for the quite important platform.

How would the experience change?

From application developer's perspective it would give more confidence that EFL properly supports Ubuntu.

But EFL would not really support Mir. Under your scenario, no EFL developers would contribute. Canonical would be the one supporting Ubuntu in EFL.

So in that way it would be a lie, implying that the EFL developers intend to provide support for Mir when they really don't. If Ubuntu decided some time down the road to stop contributing, the Mir support would be left with no support at all.

[TheBlackCat]

It would benefit any other distribution that decides to officially support Mir perhaps.

We can cross that road when (or if) we get to it.

[Teho]

What is the advantage to EFL of accepting the Mir patches rather than letting Canonical keep them as downstream patches? How would accepting the patches into their mainline code base benefit anyone, besides giving Canonical some free advertisement?

I think it's more about providing the best possible experience for the quite important platform. From application developer's perspective it would give more confidence that EFL properly supports Ubuntu.

[intellivision]

What is the advantage to EFL of accepting the Mir patches rather than letting Canonical keep them as downstream patches? How would accepting the patches into their mainline code base benefit anyone, besides giving Canonical some free advertisement?

It would benefit any other distribution that decides to officially support Mir perhaps.

[TheBlackCat]

Considering that GTK+ already has three backends and it's used by numerous applications, including stuff like Lightworks, I don't see them not supporting Mir in the future. It would be pretty unprofessional too _if_ Canonical commits to maintaining the Mir backend.

That depends on their policy on distro-specific patches, the effect it will have on the size, performance, and code-base of gtk, the quality of the submission, and how much they trust Canonical to actually maintain the code properly.

It might be true for EFL but I doubt it. The unfortuante fact is that Ubuntu is by far the most popular desktop Linux distribution.

What is the advantage to EFL of accepting the Mir patches rather than letting Canonical keep them as downstream patches? How would accepting the patches into their mainline code base benefit anyone, besides giving Canonical some free advertisement?

[Hermit]

...

That leave Qt, and KDE. Martin has already said no distro-specific patches will be accepted in Kwin, and right now the only one using or going to be using Mir is Ubuntu so support of Mir in Kwin is out of the window unless other distros pick up Mir (That ARENT ubuntu based -.-)

Digia may be swayed to support Mir just for commercial reasons, and if so, awesome, good for Mir. But Ubuntu is still gonna have to support out of tree patches for EFL, GTK and KDElibs

They're doing an in-house SDL port as well. Considering their relationship with Valve (who employs Sam Lantinga) they may have a better chance with this one.