Xfce, LXDE, & GNOME Are Running On Ubuntu XMir

[k1l_]

Exactly. That's exactly why Mir is horrible - without it, we could all move over to Wayland in peace and quiet. Now, it's become a huge mess, thanks to Canonical's bumbling. What Canonical is doing is probably holding the Linux desktop back for several years.

without MIR noone would care about Wayland atleast for the next century and we would be using X anyway. After Ubuntu announced MIR suddenly there is some rushing for Wayland and, of course, KDE and RedHat keeping the shitstorm against Ubuntu/Canonical going.

[k1l_]

You're distorting things on several levels:
1. GNOME is not Red Hat
2. The problem is making a business decision (not a technical one) and not telling anyone about it
3. Another problem was all the incorrect statement about Wayland
4. They committed on Wayland, but kept it a secret when they changed their minds

I does not matter who does things like above (#2-#4). It is just bad.

1. how much "gnome is not redhat" was recently shown, when redhat forced gnome to keep the gnome-fallback/classic desktop although gnome wanted to get rid of that old desktop style. so that is a big lie, that only canonical takes business decisions into the "community". but redhat gets applause for that.

2. with all the drama comming up after that MIR announce, do you even think there was a chance of a cooperation from ubuntu/canonical and the wayland-team for reaching the targets that ubuntu/canonical got? i dont think so.best proof is that "distro-specific" stuff we see nowadays.

3. that statement was bad and it was appologised for. but does that justify all the shitstorm, FUD and exclusion that is going on since march? the ubuntu/canonical side tried to reach a hand several times since then but the "community" didnt show any behaviour they want to see from canonical themselves.

4. so its still a secret? no. they made MIR as open as possible after the announcment.

[seb24]

Nope, dee is totally correct here. When Google introduced Android, the Gnu/Linux community was not happy, and as you can see, there are very little applications that are currently cross platforms between X/Gnu/Linux and Android, or that benefited desktop Linux.

About your second point:
- BSD in this discussion can be considered a different system altogether. There are many projects not more portable from/to BSD than from Windows or OSX. It's part of the OSS ecosystem, but not the Linux ecosystem. Not much to do in this discussion.
- Pulseaudio was an improvement to existing solutions. Even then, due to new sound API, it break loads of stuff and got undeniably high amount of hate. What do you think would happen if a company decided to develop yet another soundserver based on the same technology, but with a different API?
- systemd is an improvement to existing solutions, and more importantly doesn't require any change to the applications themselves, only their packaging. No compatibility problem, no problem.
- file systems don't require changing the applications either. Obviously, if a company decided to create a second, different kernel filesystem API just for their own use, I highly doubt it would be accepted upstream and people would be happy about it.

The key point is, for acceptance, you must either bring something better, or something compatible API/protocol-wise.
Mir is comparable or inferior technology compared to Wayland, yet incompatible.
They would have made a complete reimplementation of the wayland libs, with their own shell and compositor name "Mir", around the wayland protocol, nobody would have complained. They choose to do that, but through an undefined but incompatible protocol. Hence the mental storm (well, that plus the false promises, hidden development, lack of knowledge yet bad comments about wayland, etc.. that really did not help).

- We are not speaking about Linux but more about free software project. BSD can be considered as a different Kernel. Debian propose a version of the distribution with BSD. And other Kernel exist not only Linux or BSD and it's a really cool point because we don't depend of one project. And people are happy with that.
- Alsa it was working fine PulseAudio not at the begining and for some years... Is the same here. A new project bringing problems, bug and applications fails.
- SystemD : I love the "no problem" ... But other project exist here too and SystemD is part important of the system and some problem emerge from the SystemD decisions. Again you ignore some things.
- Filesystem are not compatible with all the system and you need to write API for the kernel like you need to write backend for display server.

For Mir they can do a piece of crap not working at all, they are right because is one of the basis of the free software... They Can fork Wayland, patch Wayland they can do another project. You can't be critic about that if they think is a better way for them and the project.

[bkor]

1 - I don't say Gnome is Red-Hat saying that red-hat take business decision and no one speak about that. I don't care too, but i'm surprised how the people can have some variable appreciation depending of the company.
2 - They say it and have all the Canonical Hater on the web doing some FUD. And as we can read here they keep going in this way, against proper rules of the free software.
3 - Yes big communication mistake here. But we can read a lot of "incorrect statement" from the community against Ubuntu project from long time ago...
4 - No they speaking about other possibility than wayland from one year I think, staying officially with Wayland. And Canonical do what they want. As red-Hat can do it the same. Is business decision.

In fact I can understand some people don't like the method but the Mir project stay a free software project and we have to judge it from a technical point of view, not from some obscur and absurd ideology.

EDIT : when I arrive in free software world 7 years ago I was really exciting to see people speaking and fighting about technical views and for the better technical solution. Now what I see is lot of crap, ideology speaking, politics and corporation fight. I'ts ugly and toxic for the community... And people as you can see before can put all the free software rules in the trash only to rant against a company or a project... I'm really sad to see that.

1. Again you make it about the company. It is not.
2. Again you make it about the company. I said it was utterly wrong to keep it a secret. You reply that it is about Canonical. These are not related.
3. Wtf? Mistake? It is a big reason for why Mir is not liked!
4. Fuck off already. They have said nothing like that. At GNOME we heard rumours, that is it.

Later you said it should be viewed from a technical standpoint, while you continue to suggest that it is about some company. You keep on saying it is about a company, while ignoring the arguments from others.

Now from GNOME standpoint, we were told by Canonical that they'd go for Wayland. Suddenly they'd go Mir. They stated that Mir is solely for Unity and unstable API, etc. Now they're offering help and say that they can assist but we should do the porting.

Technically it is hard enough to mix Wayland and X. Why should Mir be added again?!?

[bkor]

1. how much "gnome is not redhat" was recently shown, when redhat forced gnome to keep the gnome-fallback/classic desktop although gnome wanted to get rid of that old desktop style. so that is a big lie, that only canonical takes business decisions into the "community". but redhat gets applause for that.

2. with all the drama comming up after that MIR announce, do you even think there was a chance of a cooperation from ubuntu/canonical and the wayland-team for reaching the targets that ubuntu/canonical got? i dont think so.best proof is that "distro-specific" stuff we see nowadays.

3. that statement was bad and it was appologised for. but does that justify all the shitstorm, FUD and exclusion that is going on since march? the ubuntu/canonical side tried to reach a hand several times since then but the "community" didnt show any behaviour they want to see from canonical themselves.

4. so its still a secret? no. they made MIR as open as possible after the announcment.

Dude, I am part of the GNOME release team.

1. Entirely bullshit from your side.

2. Mir is different from Wayland. Two different projects. If Canonical wants to use Wayland, cool. They chose Mir, cool. This co-orperation I don't get.

3. Bullshit again. It is totally unclear why Mir exists. It was mentioned that Mir is Unity only. Exclusion? They told GNOME Mir is Unity only. There is no way to get Mir building on any other distribution. Wtf are you smoking?!?

Regarding "the ubuntu/canonical side tried to reach a hand several times since": show some links how they reached out to GNOME. I can show you where they said Mir is Unity only. Only very recently they changed their minds again.

[r_a_trip]

Exactly. That's exactly why Mir is horrible - without it, we could all move over to Wayland in peace and quiet. Now, it's become a huge mess, thanks to Canonical's bumbling. What Canonical is doing is probably holding the Linux desktop back for several years.

I don't disagree with that, but the reality here is that Mir is going to stay and unless Canonical "sees the light" or folds, the world will have to deal with both Mir and Wayland.

The cheapest option for Canonical is to get the flavours to use XMir. It solves the problem of having to deal with two session compositors (Mir or Wayland) at boot time, which makes the boot process for Canonical much more neat and clean. It removes the immediate question of how to deal with the flavours, without outright "killing" them. Since X is with us for years to come (thanks in part to the existence of Mir), it isn't even unreasonable to point to this as a "solution". XMir is rootless, so technically already better than X.org and it will (in lieu) of running on top of Mir, be able to use EGL drivers.

Will DE's such as Gnome and KDE drop X support, when they know that will instantly cut off several *buntu spinoffs from being able to use these DE's? X support is already in place (they started out on X), so maintaining X compatibility isn't a huge from scratch task, but more a maintenance job.

The politics between Wayland, Mir and the DE's will most likely preclude any meaningful meeting of the minds, such that the DE's both support Mir and Wayland natively and applications don't have to worry about what draws the pretty pictures. So X becomes the abstracted API layer, which unifies the two systems, but ironically negating the sole reason for both systems to exist in the first place, which was to retire the cruft of X.

[seb24]

3. Bullshit again. It is totally unclear why Mir exists. It was mentioned that Mir is Unity only. Exclusion? They told GNOME Mir is Unity only. There is no way to get Mir building on any other distribution. Wtf are you smoking?!?

Mir is not Unity only .. .As you say Bullshit.
Wtf are you smoking ?

Regarding "the ubuntu/canonical side tried to reach a hand several times since": show some links how they reached out to GNOME. I can show you where they said Mir is Unity only. Only very recently they changed their minds again.

No and from the beginning. Bullshit again.

[bkor]

Mir is not Unity only .. .As you say Bullshit.
Wtf are you smoking ?


No and from the beginning. Bullshit again.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2013-March/msg00152.html

I said can provide references.

To make it 100% clear:

“Perhaps we’ll become so awesome that it’ll make sense for GNOME or KDE to rebase their compositors on Mir, but that’s a long way away. ”

i.e. there is no such call.

[phoen1x]

1 - I don't say Gnome is Red-Hat saying that red-hat take business decision and no one speak about that. I don't care too, but i'm surprised how the people can have some variable appreciation depending of the company.

Thanks to RedHat(and other companies) we have modern operating system called linux. Seriously i hate people like you, u are just stupid sheep that's all. You praise company which gives nothing for linux. I wonder why RedHat don't wanna take leadership with Fedora on linux desktop. Remember when canonical came out? They spent lots of money on free lolbuntu cd's instead they could hire some programmers or fund programmers to help linux get better.

EDIT : when I arrive in free software world 7 years ago I was really exciting to see people speaking and fighting about technical views and for the better technical solution. Now what I see is lot of crap, ideology speaking, politics and corporation fight. I'ts ugly and toxic for the community... And people as you can see before can put all the free software rules in the trash only to rant against a company or a project... I'm really sad to see that.

There is no ideology here. Sane people see that canonical is hurting linux because they don't care about linux. They want power, they want control, they want money. They have control over lots of brainwashed sheeps here.

[r_a_trip]

Hope you now understand why "a next gen graphics stack is being overruled by X with a vengeance" is so wrong.

Oke, clear. This means a hard schism between *buntu and non-buntu system. That is also a clear solution. I didn't expect that of a hard line stance, but it avoids compromising to accommodate a vendor specific display server.