NVIDIA Presents Its Driver Plans To Support Mir/Wayland & KMS On Linux

[Attent?ter]

Mir kicked Wayland only more into public media :P.

Ubuntu also lost a lot of developers/Testers over Mir

[johnc]

Ubuntu also lost a lot of developers/Testers over Mir

The whole Ubuntu "community" has basically imploded, from both the Mir idea and a variety of other annoying trends in the company.

How long is Shuttleworth going to hemorrhage cash to pursue this Linux hobby of his?

[MartinN]

Right? thats why they are number 1?

Only if distrowatch is your sole source of truth. And that's for desktop use only, and only God knows how they collect those stats or what they mean.

johnc is right - you can stick a fork in Canonical. They played their hand. They could not or would not feel the pulse of the community for whatever specific reason Shuttleworth has or had and now they are going to pay the price of becoming irrelevant. Period, end of story.

[CoderniX]

To be honest here, some comments do sound like personal fantasies and dreams rather than actual facts backed by numbers and ratios.

People can hate Canonical as much as they want, but they --Canonical & Ubuntu-- are going to remain for some time, and apparently in the human knowledge they will get stronger by the day.

Ubuntu has almost become the De Facto Distro that represents Linux among the Big Boys and striving companies, and choose whatever you want, Ubuntu is there for one simple reason: It has made Linux easier and made it adoptable by the general public and the non-geeky communities.

Check out "Microsoft" Skype, Adobe, EditShare LightWorks, Google, Valve, WPS...etc all of them provide most of the time both 32bit and 64bit Ubuntu Debs for their software and some of them had even started their Linux endeavors from Ubuntu like Porting LightWorks for the first time to Linux, which was done on Ubuntu, the same for Valve's Steam, Adobe's Brackets and several other examples.

Canonical allied with the Chinese and provided them Kylin Ubuntu, which is just a Chinesified version of their Distro, as it's purely Ubuntu to the core for everything else.

Canonical doing Mir isn't like Upstart, which by the way is much better than Systemd, as Mir is the answer for their convergence agenda, and yes, it suits mainly Ubuntu, and it may require some extra work to implement the same for the other Distros, and if people haven't realized yet, Ubuntu is creating for the first time a stable consistent community for the ordinary Linux users, who don't care about FOSS, Open Source GPU drivers or proprietary ones, rather they want a stable OS that runs their Office Suite, their best FPS game being rendered under the highest fps as well, their Internet Navigation Software, and all that get them going on their daily lives' schedules, yet one more thing that the general masses die for is the simplicity of use, which is in fact the familiarity of what you use on several devices, and that's a thing Apple had mastered a bit way before the others.

Once people can get around a DE, they start associating the Familiarity with Simplicity, and they love to have the same experience and the same UI on their PCs, Smart Phones, Tablets, TVs, Cameras and the rest, and for God's sake show me one single Linux Company that tries to do the same?

You find Jolla is only interested in Sailfish OS for Smart Phones and may be Tablets, RedHat is interested in Servers and Desktops through RedHat/RedHat Enterprise/Fedora & CentOS, and the same for SuSe, Arch, Gentoo or whatever, even Google is trying somehow to converge their Android with ChromeOS by allowing APKs to run under Chrome, but come on. There is No One filling in the Blank except Canonical via Ubuntu, which is a fact a lot of people try to not see willingly or unwillingly, and for that reason of consistency, Canonical has to be fully free and independent on what they provide as a solution, and at the same time they had to take out some liberties that may ruin their vision of their UX or something else, I don't see it more of seizing control of everything, but as making sure no one will mess up the whole ecosystem in a critical moment just like what happened with Gnome, which pushed everybody to create their alternative, i.e. Unity and the others.

And the main point of having Mir as I can see right now, is the same reason why Apple had their own implementation of X11 a.k.a XQuartz, and I'd say it's a good strategic point to avoid any potential inhibitors, be it some Distros or even some Board Members wanting to keep some very old Backward Compatibilities, when the Hardware's advancements are booming, or those who want to cause even more fragmentation by wanting their own thing or even abandon it totally ? la Gnome/Gnome Shell/GTK/Cinnamon/Mate or Miguel de Icaza cursing upon the Project he had created and promoted for years.

If Canonical has to avoid something alike, I totally understand their CLA, although I don't like it, but I can understand their own perspective of things, and Mir falls into the same issue.

For now, I'm interested to see Mir being used by default, because an OS is what the other Apps make of it, and once Mir is in place, I'm pretty sure lots of developers or rather the wanted Software Developers will create specific Ubuntu Debs, and hopefully they'll be using the New suggested Packaging solution, and if that ever happens, I'd say they'll beat down all their competitors in the short run.

Just imagine you are guaranteed that your Software won't be broken by your customers running an Update or an Upgrade because the Packaging System includes all the Libs that are required for yours to run just as it's supposed to in an era where kids have Terrabytes on their Mini HDDs and nobody cares about the few added megabytes that ensures the best availability of your software on the targeted platform :/

Finally, for all those speaking with certainty and those betting that Canonical will abandon Mir in favor of Wayland, I'd ask, what would you do when Mir gets more acceptance/approval and will be more used than Wayland in the World? Just hypothetically asking.

[philip550c]

Only if distrowatch is your sole source of truth. And that's for desktop use only, and only God knows how they collect those stats or what they mean.

johnc is right - you can stick a fork in Canonical. They played their hand. They could not or would not feel the pulse of the community for whatever specific reason Shuttleworth has or had and now they are going to pay the price of becoming irrelevant. Period, end of story.

I don't even like ubuntu but you're in a dream world. Ubuntu is the only distro non Linux people have heard of. It's on the rise in usage. The server os is very popular and it's the number one distro for openstack. You guys are delusional.

[johnc]

That was a well-thought out post but let me just uncork a bit since I probably have a reputation for sugar-coating things too much around here.

Why do we keep comparing everything re: Linux to Apple? Apple doesn't know a damn thing about writing good software. Forget about Quartz. Quartz is garbage. Has anybody even tried playing games on OS X? It's a complete trainwreck! Performance is awful, there's no raw mouse input. Linux is already better (technical side) than OS X, we don't need to go backwards.

And if you want to see success in OS sales and see how the world works, you look at MS, not Apple. Apple is a fifth-rate PC vendor behind Acer. ACER!!! A-C-E-R!!!

The only thing Apple is good at is selling low-quality hardware at premium prices, and finding people to fall for it. I read a report that Apple takes 50% of PC profits (despite practically no selling marketshare). That says it all, folks. We know how to calculate "profit": revenue minus expenditures. You're not going to find that kind of irrationality in the Linux-buying market.


As for Canonical. To me they started off as the "Hey, we're the opposite of the corporate Red Hat crap" company. And everyone was like, "Yay! Linux for human beings!" IOW, going against the grain was their attitude. That turned into the, "Hey, we're going to be like Apple. Who told you you could put that icon there in the system tray? No! Remove it!" company. And everyone was like, "WTF just happened?" Suddenly it was less about the Ubuntu community and more about some design fairy-dusters in Canonical using the distro as their pet project. We get these UI tweaks and new icons and meanwhile look at all the bugs marked "Critical: Triaged" in LaunchPad.

So I'm kind of on the opposite side where I think Canonical needed to buck the "Linux community" (read: RedHat) and do their own thing, just like Google did with ChromeOS and Android, but at the same time needed to do it in a way that actually addressed real user needs.

But they're not doing that anymore.

Now they're doing phones.

And let's be serious here... this has got to be the last straw for Shuttleworth. I can't see him going on when even this venture fails. And make no mistake, the market trends are clear: they will make no money on this venture and accumulate no significant market share.

Finally, for all those speaking with certainty and those betting that Canonical will abandon Mir in favor of Wayland, I'd ask, what would you do when Mir gets more acceptance/approval and will be more used than Wayland in the World? Just hypothetically asking.

I'm the wrong guy to ask. I'm still committed to the idea that X is the wave of the future. Though admittedly all this talk from the GPU vendors about Wayland, Mir, etc. is making me a little nervous about my prediction.

[etienne85]

I don't even like ubuntu but you're in a dream world. Ubuntu is the only distro non Linux people have heard of. It's on the rise in usage. The server os is very popular and it's the number one distro for openstack. You guys are delusional.

This doesn't imply it will always stay the same, one example could be others distro becoming quickly popular (mint not to mention it) or newcoming SteamOS which could become popular due its promotion and the increase interest of Linux as a gaming platform.
But I believe Debian built upon its social contract is the solid value!

[valeriodean]

To be honest here, some comments do sound like personal fantasies and dreams rather than actual facts backed by numbers and ratios.
Finally, for all those speaking with certainty and those betting that Canonical will abandon Mir in favor of Wayland, I'd ask, what would you do when Mir gets more acceptance/approval and will be more used than Wayland in the World? Just hypothetically asking.

Don't bother to answer. Meantime Mir will reach the 1.0, the world will be already on wayland for quite a while.
Consider this scenario:
Middle of 2015, I will play some AAA game through my nvidia, using their blob on top of wayland. Then I will take a quick break alt+tab-ing to the browser just to see the nth article about "when Mir gets more acceptance/approval and will be more used than Wayland?".
:-)

[brosis]

Canonical has failed community to provide stable basis by reducing, hindering and banning non-official respins.
It has failed free software enthusiasts with its CLA,proprietary welcoming application store and closed source server side software.
It has failed linux developers by sabotaging systemd, git, wayland instead of supporting and profiting it.
It has failed usual users by not making things easier like OpenSuse, Magea, Manjaro and so on - one still has to resort to terminal.
Its primary GUI targets ... small display smartphones.

For fscks sake, since about 2013 Ubuntu is basically drifting. Ubuntu does not stand for the word it associates itself with - it does not behave humane. Whats the Zulu word for "exploiting"?

I'm the wrong guy to ask. I'm still committed to the idea that X is the wave of the future. Though admittedly all this talk from the GPU vendors about Wayland, Mir, etc. is making me a little nervous about my prediction.

Wayland is X redesigned for bitmap-based hardware, no need to be nervous. At least not till it gets network transparent memory buffer security exploits.

[johnc]

Whats the Zulu word for "exploiting"?

RedHat?