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

[starshipeleven]

Such a thing already exists. It's called ndiswrapper

True, but for the sake of kittens I'll clarify.
Ndiswrapper is OK, but it is still much better to just do some research before buying, or finding a good source of supported wifi cards to swap.

[starshipeleven]

3) The attitude that "people who need windows app or hardware should use windows" is why Linux remains at 3% desktop user share. Many of us have wanted to get off Windows but cannot because we are tied to proprietary apps and some hardware that Linux does not support.

If you're tied to proprietary crap and it is bothering you, then you should fight to break free from it, not whine to relax rules in a vane attempt to get your cake and eat it too.

You know "fight", that thing that requires resources to get some shit done at the end and resembles "work" in many ways.
Pay for opensource development, campaign for opensource awareness, that kinds of stuff.

The main disageement I have with RMS is that by supporting some binary drivers from Windows, in the long run, most of the world would be running a fully open source OS.

This is illogical. If you allow binary drivers then you aren't running a fully opensource OS.

[DanL]

Such a thing already exists. It's called ndiswrapper

Ndiswrapper is OK, but it is still much better to just do some research before buying

ndiswrapper is for Win XP-based drivers, which are becoming rare, and Win XP-64 are even rarer. ndiswrapper is almost irrelevant today.

[Awesomeness]

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.

Mate could just as well use libmutter for their window manager. Elementary does that for their Pantheon desktop. Seems to work fine. CLA'ed Mir crap is not needed for small desktops.

[Geopirate]

We have the Gnome, KDE and Enlightenment Wayland implementations, is Mir already on par with these? If not that's where they should really put their efforts. I know it's unreasonable to expect everything to get ported to Wayland overnight but it's happening over time, but the time they get Mir into shape, there will be more and more apps. I know there are a lot of power users on this forum, but it's getting pretty close to the point that regular people can run a pure Wayland system.

[theghost]

Also, on a driver compatability layer, it wouldnt be messy. I would advocate such things be done outside the kernel or in a module, then the mess would only be loaded by people who need it

That is why proprietary drivers like the Nvidia driver and Ndiswrapper were so successful.
We don't need this crappy windows driver in Linux, which are often buggy, non-fixable and break with every kernel release.

Driver developers today use firmware for keeping their company secrets, the rest can be build as proper kernel driver.

[theghost]

I believe eON is a well known wine based library for games

It's not true. EON is NOT a wine based library, it works differently.
See: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articl.../page=1#r66933

[Vistaus]

ndiswrapper is for Win XP-based drivers, which are becoming rare, and Win XP-64 are even rarer. ndiswrapper is almost irrelevant today.

Rare? I've walked into the Media Markt (which is a big electronics store chain over here!) a few months ago and a lot of hardware parts/external hardware still said "Win XP/Vista/7/8/10 drivers" on the box. So they're not all that rare yet.

[Vistaus]

We have the Gnome, KDE and Enlightenment Wayland implementations

Don't forget about Sway

[Vistaus]

3) The attitude that "people who need windows app or hardware should use windows" is why Linux remains at 3% desktop user share. Many of us have wanted to get off Windows but cannot because we are tied to proprietary apps and some hardware that Linux does not support.

Yeah, luckily I one run one Windows app and it has been running fine for years now under Wine, because the developer actually makes sure every new release is compatible with Wine before releasing the new version But not everyone is as lucky. Although more and more apps are becoming cloud-based now, meaning that any HTML5 browser can run them. Including Linux browsers (and BSD browsers, Haiku browsers, AmigaOS4 browsers, etc., etc. - basically every niche OS with an HTML5 browser lol).