Ubuntu 14.04 Codename Revealed, Mir Haters Attacked

[xeekei]

Can someone please explain to me what is so bad about MIR. I've looked at it and it looks like a nice improvement. I don't know why everyone bashes it. I'm not trying to defend it, I'm just looking to get educated about what the problem with it is. I mean, there isn't anything else to use righT? There's Weston but that's just a reference thing and not even fully operational display server.

Wayland is a protocol. Why is it bad to have MIR display server based on the protocol. Thanks.

The idea with Wayland is making the already available compositors the "display servers", like KWin in KDE and Mutter in GNOME. Mir wouldn't be a problem at all if it used the Wayland protocol, but it doesn't. It uses its own.

[TheBlackCat]

Wayland is a protocol. Why is it bad to have MIR display server based on the protocol. Thanks.

Mir isn't based on the Wayland protocol. It doesn't really even have a protocol (not a stable one at least), and it is completely incompatible with Wayland in pretty much every way that matters.

[TheBlackCat]

Anyway, after comments like these from the head of Canonical I would suspect any chance of reconciliation that may have remained is now gone.

[dee.]

Open letter to M.S., the new MS

Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what THEIR agenda is.

When a leader of a company such as Canonical makes statements like this, it reeks of ideological warfare. You are making a strawman argument, twisting the views of your opposition to suit your rhetoric. This is pages from the book of Jobs. It's a PR move, it's designed to rile up your followers, and we get to hear more enthusiastic Ubuntu fans picking up the torch and parroting your inaccurate, inane arguments accross forums.

The arguments made against Mir are not political. There are some very good arguments made, most notably, that it is causing fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem at a very fundamental level, something that goes beyond different Desktop Environments. Even with all the variation in Linux distributions, developers have always been able to count on a common display server, X, and assume it to be used on any distro. With Wayland, the transition would have been painless, since Wayland would have provided XWayland, and developers could depend on the existence of either X or Wayland. Now, that isn't the case - they can still only depend on X, the lowest common denominator - which slows down the evolution of desktop Linux overall.

In fact, if anything is a political move, it's Mir. It provides no benefit whatsoever compared to Wayland. Any claimed benefits against Wayland have been debunked. So it's obvious there's some other reason. Maybe Canonical is trying to do a powergrab, to force everyone to use their software that they control, instead of something developed collaboratively. Maybe Canonical wants to force other distros to follow Canonical's way of doing things.

But you don't have to take it from me. Listen to the words of Past Mark Shuttleworth:

we evaluated the cost of building a new display manager, informed by the lessons learned in Wayland. We came to the conclusion that any such effort would only create a hard split in the world which wasn?t worth the cost of having done it. There are issues with Wayland, but they seem to be solvable, we?d rather be part of solving them than chasing a better alternative.

What changed since then? Canonical's policies? Secret deal with Microsoft? Who knows, but the reason sure isn't technical, as everyone can already see that Mir offers nothing beyond what Wayland offers, maybe less.

At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party And to put all the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think about shell development. Every app developer will consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH?d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on? most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and hardly justified. What closely to see how competitors to Canonical torture the English language in their efforts to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but not Mir. But we?ll get it done, and it will be amazing.

Name calling, Mark? Really? This is how a leader should behave? Like a spoiled kid throwing a tantrum, when people don't agree with him? That's just sad.

Sorry, but every app developer will not use toolkits. Games, applications like XBMC, closed source software ported from other operating systems... many of these are unable or unwilling to use any of the available toolkits. Without Mir, these programs could easily be written for Wayland, and everyone - including Canonical - would be happy. But now, the developers of these programs face a choice: support the single biggest distro (plurality), or pretty much all the rest (majority) - or just default to X, which is supported on both.

I can tell you what the agenda of the Mir team is: speed, quality, reliability, efficiency. That?s it. From what I?ve seen on the smartphone, Mir is going to be a huge leap forward for gaming performance, battery life and next-generation display capabilities. So thank you for the many contributions we had to Mir, and to everyone who is testing it in more challenging environments than the smartphone. I?m enjoying it on my laptop and loving the gaming benchmarks for native Mir. So to that team, and the broader community who are helping test and refine Mir, thank you.

None of those things are yet evident. All we've seen so far is a buggy display server, whose developers are just piggybacking on the work done by Wayland developers. Also none of those things are things that Wayland lacks. Therefore none of them are good reasons to use Mir, none of them are a good reason to "create a hard split in the world".

[Storyteller]

Story about desperate man

I'll tell you a story about Desperate man, it's all truth and it's all lie.
Listen and learn.

Somewhere at the Isle of Animal there lived a man. It was very rich man. He had the gift to make money a he used it. So he made many money. With those money he bought big house and nice car. He bough yacht and a second house. Then he bought a plane and a third house. Odly, he was not satisfied.

Or not. He was satisfied, but not with making money, he was satisfied with watching progress. This man took his money and bought very expansive trip to space. Why? Because he had money and because he wanted to help space travel bussiness with his money. Or that is, what he says.

So, this man likes technology very much. This man want to see it's progress. He and group of his followers made a new, powerfull and beatiful bleeding edge free operating system. Ok, it was not so nice. System had many errors, but many people were working to make it better. Some were following the man, for his money, others, because they liked what he said. And some of them were free people, who liked freedom in this project. And man liked freedom too, or that was, what he said. Man's system was growing and he needed to upgrade graphical user interface, so he talked to free people group, called Giant, which was programming graphical interface for his Operating System using. And he asked them to make their graphical interface better, or different. They heared him, but said no. They were free to do, what they want. And they didn't want do, what somebody other have said they should do. They choosed themselfs what they want. They were free.

Ok then, said man, they don't want to make it, I make my followers do it. And he used his influence and his large piles of money to make another graphical interface and named it, after this inicident, Disunity. This new graphical interface split free people. Part loved it, because its simplicity and part hated it, because it was full of bugs and thus not so beatiful as the man said. And they hated it because other reasons, or that was, what they said.

Time has come to another upgrade of operating system. Optimized graphical server was needed. Man was looking forward to project called Waywater. That was another project free people were building and something that man needed. He was looking at their work for some time before he realized, that he needed something slightly different.

He wanted to ask free people, to do it. To change their project to his project. But they never cooperate as it was with Giants. And somewhere inside he knew. He knew that they will never do, what he want. Because they were free. And free people do only what they want. They don't do what want other people.
But Waywater was free project and free people said, if not forthright, you can use our project, change it and make it yours. So this done this. He taked their project, modified it to his taste and named this graphical server War!

And free people didn't like it. They yelled: You are thief! You are traitor!

The man was rich, the man liked his project. The man was trying to be polite, but who can be polite, when he is angry? Man has not yelled, he just talked and smiled. But his words were attacking free people and that made them angry. He liked his project, but did he like free people? He was becoming more and more desperate to show himself to have success, to make his project more succesful, so he can't hear hating yells of free people. So he can only hear yells of love from his followers.

It is all lie. And it is all truth. It is where story of Desperate man ends and I have question for You:
Did you learn from the man?
Where did the man do the mistake?
Did you learn from free people?
Did free people make mistakes too?

[entropy]

From a psychological POV:

Seems like things are not going too well at Canonical.
Why else would MS post something like that?
IMHO it sounds nervous and uncouth.

[sarmad]

That is one big arrogant block of rant text.

[chrisb]

I was under the impression that Ubuntu One is partly proprietary?

The client side is open source. The server is closed source. It did seem at one point that the plan to make Canonical profitable was to ship a completely open source desktop and provide billed-for server-side addons.

[zoomblab]

That's the spirit! MIR FTW!

[jbates]

I like protocol competition. Attacking Mir on the grounds that they're fragmenting the community goes against some core FOSS principles.

I think Canonical's main reason for making Mir is, as other's have said, so they can implement their own features (agenda) more rapidly. In many ways, starting your own display server from scratch is better than simultaneously conforming to a standard (Wayland), providing a bunch of extensions for the stuff you want (e.g. Android), and trying to get your extensions mainlined simultaneously. Do you think Canonical could have integrated Wayland as fast as they're developing Mir? If they had gone the Wayland route, what if they encountered a snag along the way that proved Wayland unsuitable for their needs? They wouldn't have been able to fix it since they don't control it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is there any effort to port Wayland to Android? If not, then I think Android support is the single most important reason why Mir exists.

As a side benefit for the entire FOSS graphics community: with three major display servers (X, Wayland, and Mir), the proprietary graphics driver people (NVIDIA and AMD) will be forced to come up with a generic solution agnostic of the display server. You know they're working on it (NVIDIA Briefly Talks Up EGL). The idea of having some nice EGL extensions instead of having to just "figure out" the ever-changing Linux interfaces for display initialization and buffer management makes me want to play around with developing my own alternative graphics stacks.