Intel Reverts Plans, Will Not Support Ubuntu's XMir

[ryao]

I think its a great move by Intel! Canonical did a lot of shit recently..

- They started Unity, big mistake! First of all, they have to update/patch the Gnome packages all the time, also the amazon advertisments are really creappy
- They use upstart instead of systemd, just because their devs developed it. Everyone else uses systemd

all this forking and shit wont help the community, and they have a lot of maintenance burden. And they just stay with the old version if it works, most of the time... Guess its a nice inovation blocker...

No one really uses Unity, Gnome 3 or LXDE is used more widely...

Would love to se a .deb based Distribution with just plain GNOME 3! (maybe mint would be great)

systemd versus upstart is a bad example. Redhat used upstart and then made systemd because they did not want to collaborate with Canonical. When you ask them why, they give many of the same statements that Canonical is making about other people's display servers.

With that said, it seems like many here criticizing Canonical have never written a line of code in their lives. If anyone should be criticized, it should be them. They are the ones not contributing, not Canonical. Whether they like Canonical's contributions is beside the point. The fact is that open source is the freedom to do your own thing, regardless of whether anyone else cares. The fact Canonical is doing something that is open source is far more than I can say for many of its critics here.

As for the very small minority that do contribute (and might have contributed code used by Canonical), the neat thing about open source software is that people can do their own thing with it. If you do not want people to do that, do not make your code open source.

[ryao]

That's incorrect, Linux is the most widely used operating system in the world. Just not on the desktop market.

Linux is not an operating system. Linux will never be an operating system. Linux is a kernel. Unless Linus merges a userland into his tree, a kernel is all that Linux will ever be.

[bkor]

systemd versus upstart is a bad example. Redhat used upstart and then made systemd because they did not want to collaborate with Canonical. When you ask them why, they give many of the same statements that Canonical is making about other people's display servers.

With that said, it seems like many here criticizing Canonical have never written a line of code in their lives. If anyone should be criticized, it should be them. They are the ones not contributing, not Canonical. Whether they like Canonical's contributions is beside the point. The fact is that open source is the freedom to do your own thing, regardless of whether anyone else cares. The fact Canonical is doing something that is open source is far more than I can say for many of its critics here.

As for the very small minority that do contribute (and might have contributed code used by Canonical), the neat thing about open source software is that people can do their own thing with it. If you do not want people to do that, do not make your code open source.

Oh please, suggest to shut the fuck up if you're a Gentoo developer and you want to talk about systemd and the reasons it was started. There are entire blog posts for why it was started. It was explained various times. Yet Gentoo made a complete fool out of themselves at the last FOSDEM. Gentoo made various mistakes in their packaging. Gentoo couldn't explain why udev was forked. Gentoo clearly has no clue.

Upstart has no dependency resolver, systemd was written because they thought the design of Upstart was wrong. RHEL 6 uses Upstart. Your lack of knowledge is pathetic. Why accuse Red Hat of not contributing while Upstart is in RHEL 6. Red Hat contributes loads and loads, hires loads of developers whom are pretty free to do what they want.

Suggest to check your facts and shut up. Especially "OMG I code and you not". I can think and apparently, you can only put blinds up.

[lopho]

Floating point performance with Intel is MUCH better than AMD CPU's.

http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/450..._i7-3770K.html

topkek.

Topic was GPUs not CPUs. I mean, isn't it obvious with Mir being a display server?
Anyways, floating point isn't as relevant on CPUs as it is on GPUs.

[ryao]

Oh please, suggest to shut the fuck up if you're a Gentoo developer and you want to talk about systemd and the reasons it was started. There are entire blog posts for why it was started. It was explained various times. Yet Gentoo made a complete fool out of themselves at the last FOSDEM. Gentoo made various mistakes in their packaging. Gentoo couldn't explain why udev was forked. Gentoo clearly has no clue.

Upstart has no dependency resolver, systemd was written because they thought the design of Upstart was wrong. RHEL 6 uses Upstart. Your lack of knowledge is pathetic. Why accuse Red Hat of not contributing while Upstart is in RHEL 6. Red Hat contributes loads and loads, hires loads of developers whom are pretty free to do what they want.

Suggest to check your facts and shut up. Especially "OMG I code and you not". I can think and apparently, you can only put blinds up.

The Gentoo udev maintainers mandated that upstream merge patches required for improved software compatibility before they would become available in the Gentoo udev package. Upstream refused and the Gentoo udev maintainers would not budge. Eventually, enough of us were so fed up that we forked to create a package that included support for our additional use cases. That was the primary reason for the fork. The secondary reason was that we did not want other distributions to suffer like we did.

Also, I accused people here of not contributing, not Redhat. Redhat did not want to work with Canonical on upstart in the same way Canonical does not want to work with Redhat on Wayland. They are both within their rights to refuse to work together. The fact that they do anything at all is more than I can say for many here.

As for shutting up, I think I have done that long enough. I shutup for several months and found that it did nothing to improve what people were saying. Maybe there would be an improvement in the quality of online discussions if you did it.

[Guest]

Linux is not an operating system. Linux will never be an operating system. Linux is a kernel. Unless Linus merges a userland into his tree, a kernel is all that Linux will ever be.

Linux is the most widely used kernel in the world. Fixed that for you.

[JX8p]

Linux is the most widely used kernel in the world. Fixed that for you.

Is this tired clich? still active enough to see posts even in 2013 about it?

The sad fact is that there is no authority on what constitutes an operating system (this is part of the--dare I say it--open-source nature of the English language). Calling the kernel the operating system is just as valid as calling the kernel + an arbitrary set of userland applications and libraries the operating system.

And in the end, it's needless pedantry anyway.

As for bkor, I don't feel that someone whose best argument is an ad-hominem against someone for being a Gentoo developer should be attempting to pitch in.

[ryao]

Linux is the most widely used kernel in the world. Fixed that for you.

How did you determine that? I have read claims that the L4 kernel is the most used kernel in the world. It is said to be present in basically all mobile phones (as the baseband processor kernel) and various other embedded devices.

For what it is worth, I have yet to find another monolithic kernel that is more widely used than Linux, but I do not have hard numbers on actual usage.

[dee.]

I'm sorry, but your suggestion that there's room for so many platforms in mobile requires an explanation of why the "dead platforms" you mention at the end of your post failed to be those extra platforms. For the first several major revisions of Microsoft's phones, usability can be considered the cause, and possibly that has left such bad taste with consumers that interest in Windows phones remains low due to traditional perception rather than current usability problems. You can't say the same for BlackBerry or webOS, however. And let's not forget Symbian, either. Sure, Symbian had some grave technical problems, but if the demand for another competitive mobile platform was there, then the interest in fixing Symbian's problems would have been higher.

If RIM aka BlackBerry, which enjoyed tremendous mindshare gained from being a successful early mover, could not maintain market position and still struggles to ensure long-term sustainability, what's to say solutions like Firefox OS, Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch will be successful? Challenge a normal customer to explain what is missing from the currently available mobile offerings, or what it is that Firefox OS, Sailfish OS or Ubuntu Touch offer that current solutions lack.

That's simple. Firefox OS is aiming at the low-end smartphone market, which will be gaining the most share: the remaining dumbphone to smartphone transition will benefit the low-end smartphone market the most, as most dumbphones are comparatively cheap, disposable even. Smartphones that are as cheap as current cheapest dumbphones are an attractive prospect for many. Firefox OS is really the only platform that is, as a platform, aiming directly at this market. Oh, there may be some Android phone makers aiming at the same market, but Android as a whole doesn't.

Not only that, but the low-end is also a growing market in poorer and less-developed countries. Do you think people will pay their year's salary just for a phone? No, but they still want smartphones, because a smartphone might be the only computing device they can afford. A low-end device, that is the same price as current dumbphones, but offers all the same functionality as current Android devices, will have great demand in a lot of markets.

Don't get me wrong, I find these platforms exciting, and would even be willing to pay a premium to get one of these over Android... as I'm sure would you, and many other people who post on these forums. But tech geeks like us are a miniscule minority. The kind of people that cause devices to move simply don't care about this shit. Firefox OS, Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch are as dead as BlackBerry, webOS and Symbian (Windows phone gets a stay of execution for the time being on account of Microsoft's continued massive investment into the platform).

Firefox OS and Sailfish are dead? Before they've even been launced properly? Gee, can I borrow that crystal ball of yours?

It seems to me that it's the exact opposite - Firefox phone preview models have all sold out, and Jolla's pre-orders of their first model sold out already. Seems to me like they're already selling like hotcakes even though they haven't even been properly launched yet. There certainly is a market for them.

Blackberry and webOS didn't make it because they made mistakes, they squandered their opportunities. Symbian was killed by the idiot Elop and his burning platforms memo, while Winphone is simply crap that no one wants - microsoft has a shitty reputation on mobile, for good reason.

Only Tizen stands a chance, and that's because it's naive to assume that Samsung will remain happy selling devices running the same platform (Android) as all of their competitors sans Apple. Tizen has the advantage of politics and Samsung's global brand recognition and manufacturing might on its side. There's your third mobile OS. Anyone else competing there will be offering highly specialized niche products sold at a premium mark-up, and mostly with no carrier subsidies.

You're thinking in too USA-centric ways. Carrier subsidies are really only a thing in the US. In much of the rest of the world, there's a much larger amount of phones being sold without subsidies. Sailfish isn't even going to launch in the USA, because of the patent minefield, but there's nothing stopping it from being a huge thing in Europe and Asia. You're also underestimating regional variations in markets, or the impact on markets the move away from dumbphones will make.

There's plenty of interest in Sailfish phones, Jolla has done a good job growing the hype, and they have the advantage of having an entirely new, gesture-based UI, no other OS has anything like it yet. Plus they have the advantage of being able to run both Meego and Android-apps, in addition to native Sailfish-apps. It's far too early to call the winners to the Smartphone race. Firefox OS has the advantage of targeting a market segment that no other really targets as of yet.

[chrisb]

Future predication...

After re-writing all their Desktop platform software and their phone/tablet OS using the Qt toolkit... Canonical/Mark eats humble pie and adopts systemd and Wayland...

It's possible. It's also possible that some other distributions might adopt Mir and/or Unity if they are successful. Multiple competing implementations is one of the strengths of open source. Microsoft used to warn "don't use Linux, you don't know what it will mutate into", instead they advocated a statist approach to software development, where the designer knows exactly where the platform will be developed over time. But not knowing is an advantage. Who could've predicted that a HTML renderer from KDE would become the dominant mobile implementation? Who could've predicted that the Linux kernel would become the dominant platform for smart phones? People can take open source software and do something cool with it, moving it in directions that it's original creators never envisaged. Some people view that as a weakness, a symptom of fragmentation, but it is actually one of the big strengths. If Mir/Unity sucks then people will switch to something else (but the detractors aren't worried that it will such, they're worried it will be good).

The only problem for this evolution approach is where politics prevents the cross pollination of ideas and code. We don't need or desire statism, and that is the reason why Mir/Unity should be packaged on other platforms if people want to do it, and why Wayland should be packaged on Ubuntu. Heck, if someone wants to, they could port Unity to Wayland. You never know - it might happen if Unity is a success.