Canonical Developers To The Community: Help Us Figure Out The Direction Of Mir

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Developers To The Community: Help Us Figure Out The Direction Of Mir

Canonical developers working on the Mir display server want feedback from the community about the direction Mir should pursue in the future now that it's getting basic Wayland support in place...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Canonical-Mir-Future-Direction

[uid313]

Abandon Mir and put the resources to improve the Wayland backend for GTK3, GTK4, Qt5, SDL, etc, instead.
Get Firefox, Chromium, GIMP, VLC, Blender and LibreOffice running on Wayland.
Improve the Unity extension for GNOME Shell.
Design a modern theme for Ubuntu to replace Ambiance, it looks terrible.

[Guest]

Why not GitLab, isn't it better than GitHub?

[Aleksei]

Abandon Mir, put some work into Wayland.

[jpg44]

Canonical should abandon Mir and instead help add whatever features it needs to Wayland. The last thing that Linux needs is a bunch of incompatible window system APIs. I don't know whats wrong with Canonical. Wayland is perfectly suitable and whatever feature they need, it would be better to just add the features they need and contribute them to the Wayland project. I also agree the ambiance theme is horrible, and that Canonical apparently is not using any sort of useability testing. Most people are familiar with the taskbar/start menu icons on desktop model.

By dumping Mir, they should also commit the developer resources freed up to contributing improvements to Wine for 99% application compatibility with Windows Apps in Wine and even look at making a driver compatability layer that would allow WIndows device drivers to be used on Linux. This would allow Linux to escape the chicken and egg problem, where many companies do not want to support Linux because it doesnt have the user base, and many users cannot use Linux because it doesnt have support for the applications and hardware people want to bring with them, by allowing more users to transition to Linux and abandon Windows altogether. Canonical should work with PC manufacturers to install Ubuntu alongside or even instead of Windows on PCs.

[Ikaris]

Am I the only one thinking that Canonical may be trapped in a sunk-cost fallacy regarding Mir?

[tomtomme]

Canonical should abandon Mir and instead help add whatever features it needs to Wayland. The last thing that Linux needs is a bunch of incompatible window system APIs. I don't know whats wrong with Canonical. Wayland is perfectly suitable and whatever feature they need, it would be better to just add the features they need and contribute them to the Wayland project. I also agree the ambiance theme is horrible, and that Canonical apparently is not using any sort of useability testing. Most people are familiar with the taskbar/start menu icons on desktop model.

By dumping Mir, they should also commit the developer resources freed up to contributing improvements to Wine for 99% application compatibility with Windows Apps in Wine and even look at making a driver compatability layer that would allow WIndows device drivers to be used on Linux. This would allow Linux to escape the chicken and egg problem, where many companies do not want to support Linux because it doesnt have the user base, and many users cannot use Linux because it doesnt have support for the applications and hardware people want to bring with them, by allowing more users to transition to Linux and abandon Windows altogether. Canonical should work with PC manufacturers to install Ubuntu alongside or even instead of Windows on PCs.

MIR is not comparable to wayland. MIR is AFAIK more like Weston (window management and compositor). Andit now works with wayland. Dumping MIR will help nobody. Helping MIR could help the smaller Desktop Environments to get wayland support, like MATE. MATE does not have the resources to migrate to wayland but with MIR they may get there.

[cl333r]

It's easy: work on Unity rather than Mir.

[DanL]

Dumping MIR will help nobody. Helping MIR could help the smaller Desktop Environments to get wayland support, like MATE.

Yeah, that.

Get Firefox, Chromium, GIMP, VLC, Blender and LibreOffice running on Wayland.

Yes, yes, we know - you want everything to run natively on Wayland and you want it done yesterday. Maybe if you repeat it 10,000 more times, it will happen. But that's up to the devs of those projects and is unrelated to the topic.

It's easy: work on Unity rather than Mir.

If they're willing to hire devs to work on Mir, there's no reason they couldn't do both.

[Brisse]

MIR is not comparable to wayland. MIR is AFAIK more like Weston (window management and compositor). Andit now works with wayland.

Wayland is the protocol specification. Weston is it's reference software implementation. Mir is another software implementation, as is GNOME's Mutter. They all use the Wayland protocol.