Mir's Wayland Support Will Now Let You Drag Around Windows

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mir's Wayland Support Will Now Let You Drag Around Windows

I was surprised to learn that up until this week, Mir's initial Wayland support didn't allow for windows of Wayland clients to be moved around the screen...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mir-Wayland-Window-Movement

[schmidtbag]

So... I totally get why there are people who are trying to keep Unity alive - for some people, that's what made them become a Linux user. But... why are people still working on Mir? That project was destined to fail when Canonical announced it, and its demise was made permanent once Canonical dropped their support of it. If Unity still has dependencies on Mir (I'm not sure if it does) I think this dev time would be better spent on transitioning Unity to Wayland. At least X11 is still a fallback.

[NateHubbard]

But... why are people still working on Mir?

So they can drag around windows. Duh!

[AlanGriffiths]

It is a shame to let facts get in the way of a good story, but here goes...

1. Canonical hasn't dropped Mir.
2. Xwayland already runs perfectly well on Mir, the discussion is about the best use of it.
3. Mir's server-side support for moving windows already allowed Wayland clients to be moved. (The change is that clients couldn't initiate the move.)

[GruenSein]

So... I totally get why there are people who are trying to keep Unity alive - for some people, that's what made them become a Linux user. But... why are people still working on Mir? That project was destined to fail when Canonical announced it, and its demise was made permanent once Canonical dropped their support of it. If Unity still has dependencies on Mir (I'm not sure if it does) I think this dev time would be better spent on transitioning Unity to Wayland. At least X11 is still a fallback.

As far as I understand, Mir has nothing to do with Unity per se. It is the display server that originally had its own protocol. Now, since nobody else wanted to maintain wayland and mir as next gen display solutions it is starting to implement support for wayland clients. While gnome, KDE etc. have their own display server when running via wayland this might still benefit smaller projects without the resources to implenent their own solution. At least, it's now becoming compatible with the community solution. A valid question however is, why canonical is keeping the project alive at all after switching to gnome which already has a wayland server..

[Michael]

2. Xwayland already runs perfectly well on Mir, the discussion is about the best use of it.
3. Mir's server-side support for moving windows already allowed Wayland clients to be moved. (The change is that clients couldn't initiate the move.)

Thanks for those clarifications, made some updates to article.

[schmidtbag]

As far as I understand, Mir has nothing to do with Unity per se. It is the display server that originally had its own protocol. Now, since nobody else wanted to maintain wayland and mir as next gen display solutions it is starting to implement support for wayland clients. While gnome, KDE etc. have their own display server when running via wayland this might still benefit smaller projects without the resources to implenent their own solution. At least, it's now becoming compatible with the community solution.

I know Mir isn't directly related to Unity, but to my understanding, Unity is the only environment built with Mir in mind (I think GNOME is Mir compatible, but it wasn't developed for Mir, and it has good/better Wayland support). At this point, Unity is being developed with Wayland support in mind (maybe it already works with Wayland, I'm not really sure), so as far as I'm concerned Mir is pretty much obsolete, or at least its obsolescence is on the horizon.

A valid question however is, why canonical is keeping the project alive at all after switching to gnome which already has a wayland server..

Isn't it more for the sake of LTS?

[AlanGriffiths]

I know Mir isn't directly related to Unity, but to my understanding, Unity is the only environment built with Mir in mind (I think GNOME is Mir compatible, but it wasn't developed for Mir, and it has good/better Wayland support). At this point, Unity is being developed with Wayland support in mind (maybe it already works with Wayland, I'm not really sure), so as far as I'm concerned Mir is pretty much obsolete, or at least its obsolescence is on the horizon.

I think there's some confusion between "Unity7", "Unity8" and "Unity" (which clearly not what is being discussed above).

Unity7 was the default desktop for Ubuntu until 17.10 and is based on compiz (and X11).
Unity8 was planned as a convergent shell working across desktop, phone and other devices and is based on Mir.

Although Canonical cancelled Unity8 and adopted the Gnome desktop Unity8 didn't stop there: the UBports community is continuing work on it.

Mir was not cancelled by Canonical, it is used principally for mir-kiosk and could, if there's interest, also be used desktop environments other than Unity8.

Any Mir server, including Unity8, works with both Wayland clients and legacy Mir clients.

[jo-erlend]

A valid question however is, why canonical is keeping the project alive at all after switching to gnome which already has a wayland server..

It would be nice to have a fast path to developing light-weight kiosks, for instance. 1) Install Ubuntu Core 2) Install the Mir snap, 3) install your app snap. Done.

Or maybe they just want a product that can be finished rather than being a permanently ongoing effort. For me, Unity 7 is an absolutely fantastic product and I could use it forever, or until my fundamental needs changes. It's designed to be completed and it more or less is just that. Literally the only problem I have with Unity 7, is the stack it is based on.

[GizmoChicken]

Any Mir server, including Unity8, works with both Wayland clients and legacy Mir clients.

You mentioned elsewhere that "Once Mir’s support for Wayland clients is on a par with the support for 'native' Mir clients [Canonical] will likely phase out support for the latter." Is that still the plan?

I think there's some confusion between . . .

Speaking of confusion, many seem to confuse Mir (the display server) with support for Mir clients. And if in the future Mir will no longer support Mir clients, well . . .

Once a product has strong name recognition (which Mir has), changing the product's name is generally a bad idea. But if Mir will no longer support Mir clients, this may be a rare situation in which rebranding makes good sense.

Has Canonical considered renaming Mir (the display server) to something less confusing?