Intel Reverts Plans, Will Not Support Ubuntu's XMir

[talvik]

Yes, building was apparently a "real PITA" - but it's been done. And it's working, from last paragraph: "Oh!! And yes, it also runs on my box."

Yes, it's just Unity not Mir, but Mir won't be far behind: "Obviously we will be working closely with Debian to help get Mir in the Debian archives too."

At some point in the future Mir+Unity is likely to be available in Debian. Obviously it's still in heavy development at the moment, but there are going to be Debian users who want to run it on Debian, and once it stabilises it will be easier to package.

He clearly states that it need a lot of work, he won't continue, and he can't do it alone. And that's 8 months ago.

Again, get Mir/Unity on Debian and you end up replacing so much it's not even Debian anymore.

[LinuxGamer]

Debian Stable is slow to update, but that's the whole point. Believe it or not, there are actually people who need two years of stability between updates. If you want a faster rolling release use Testing or Sid.

if its not in Debian Stable or testing and if it's in Unstable that looks just like maintains for Ubuntu to me i been using Debian a long time i know how they roll some of the best server software in the world is Debian Stable

[F i L]

What games do not use SDL/GTK/Qt/OpenGL? I mean popular games, not xeyes or xboing.

I'm pretty sure all Unity3D games, though that could be mis-information on my part (trying to find where i read that). Also, why did you list 'OpenGL' along with SDL/GTK/Qt?

Regardless, if SDL becomes a "required" part of the Linux desktop ecosystem to game devs (mostly due to Mir), it will need to be promoted and documented as such. One of the biggest complaints you hear from people trying to port things to X11, is that it has very unclear documentation (to this day, Unity3D doesn't return correct resolution information when running on multi-monitor setups, due to a misuse of Ximena most likely caused by the time it takes their devs to learn how properly use it). That's a big turn-off to developers, and I can easily see that happening again if an essential third-party toolkit is only semi-promoted.

[dee.]

People have been working on getting Unity and Mir packaged on Debian. Latest reports are that it runs fine. Debian bug #609278

Even if this is true, that just means that someone has managed to run Mir and/or Unity on another distro. That's not the point. The point is, that Mir only works with Unity, and no other DE will support Mir, because of the way Mir is made with only Unity's needs in mind, with no stable protocol of any kind to help with compatibility.

So the choice for other distros is clear - start using Unity + Mir, or use Wayland + whatever DE they want. That's the problem with Mir, it's fundamentally anti-choice. Wayland is designed to be agnostic to distro, desktop environment and hardware - it runs anywhere, kind of like the Linux kernel. It suits a wide range of needs and use cases. Mir is just tailored for the needs of Canonical, no more, no less - if anyone else wants to get it running, they have to constantly adapt to Canonical's choices and play catch-up to whatever crazy decisions they make. When you consider that there's already a better alternative, one that is far less work and headache for the devs - Wayland, it's no wonder that Mir isn't getting any adoption outside Canonical.

[dee.]

The last thing we want is Intel having any success in the mobile market. Before you know it they'll push everyone else out and then charge $300 for a mobile CPU.

Not going to happen, x86 simply can't compete with more simple archs like ARM or MIPS on the mobile segment. x86 is competitive on the laptop/desktop space due to it's good performance, which people want for gaming or development or anything that requires lots of CPU power (and there's lock-in due to closed-source software like games being written mainly for x86). But for the mobile and device space, it's got way too much legacy cruft, making it too expensive and too complex to be competitive. Maybe Intel will be able to catch up in power usage and thermal specs eventually, but price is still a prohibitive factor.

This is just baseless fearmongering, basically. Intel has other, very profitable markets, they don't need the mobile market to survive - despite what all the tablet-enthusiasts like to pretend.

[LinuxGamer]

Not going to happen, x86 simply can't compete with more simple archs like ARM or MIPS on the mobile segment. x86 is competitive on the laptop/desktop space due to it's good performance, which people want for gaming or development or anything that requires lots of CPU power (and there's lock-in due to closed-source software like games being written mainly for x86). But for the mobile and device space, it's got way too much legacy cruft, making it too expensive and too complex to be competitive. Maybe Intel will be able to catch up in power usage and thermal specs eventually, but price is still a prohibitive factor.

This is just baseless fearmongering, basically. Intel has other, very profitable markets, they don't need the mobile market to survive - despite what all the tablet-enthusiasts like to pretend.

the new Intel chip is fast as hell and far as i know it killed all the chips in its class

[chrisb]

He clearly states that it need a lot of work, he won't continue, and he can't do it alone. And that's 8 months ago.

He did want to continue and was asking for other people who were interested. Regardless, that was only a short project by one man, and he got it up and running. As people get more interested in Mir/Unity, maybe more developers will show up to help. Maybe some of the Ubuntu developers will help out. I can't predict the future, but I do think it is likely that it will be packaged at some point. Using the progress of one man, working on a project in his spare time, at a single point in time, does not seem a reasonable basis to conclude that Mir/Unity will never, ever, be packaged in Debian.

Again, get Mir/Unity on Debian and you end up replacing so much it's not even Debian anymore.

There are over 30,000 packages in Debian. It's a bit dramatic to claim that the changes required to package Mir/Unity would make it "not even Debian anymore". The Unity packaging developer lists 19 packages in total, including 8 that are clearly Unity itself, so that leaves 11 other packages that need patching - and he did also say "Many of it is already in Debian in sid and experimental". We are talking about patches to less than 0.001% of the Debian packages, that is not going to make it "not Debian anymore".

[johnc]

Not going to happen, x86 simply can't compete with more simple archs like ARM or MIPS on the mobile segment. x86 is competitive on the laptop/desktop space due to it's good performance, which people want for gaming or development or anything that requires lots of CPU power (and there's lock-in due to closed-source software like games being written mainly for x86). But for the mobile and device space, it's got way too much legacy cruft, making it too expensive and too complex to be competitive. Maybe Intel will be able to catch up in power usage and thermal specs eventually, but price is still a prohibitive factor.

This is just baseless fearmongering, basically. Intel has other, very profitable markets, they don't need the mobile market to survive - despite what all the tablet-enthusiasts like to pretend.

You might want to let Intel know that they have no shot in the mobile market. They clearly have very different intentions. Of course I was merely responding to the idea that we need to have Tizen take off.

[chrisb]

I'm pretty sure all Unity3D games, though that could be mis-information on my part (trying to find where i read that). Also, why did you list 'OpenGL' along with SDL/GTK/Qt?

I assume OpenGL apps are going to either run as is, or be trivial to get running, on both Mir and Wayland, since both use the same lower level EGL driver stack which is what actually handles OpenGL.

[LinuxGamer]

You might want to let Intel know that they have no shot in the mobile market. They clearly have very different intentions. Of course I was merely responding to the idea that we need to have Tizen take off.

you know i can see a really usable Tizen desktop if that happens R.I.P. Ubuntu