Canonical Joined The Khronos Group To Help Mir/Wayland Drivers

[scionicspectre]

All of us should be on the same side and applaud new free open creations, it's ridiculous to create so many divisions and try to defame X company because they choose to create Y software that we feel shouldn't exist. You know what? In Apple & Microsoft's perfect world - Linux wouldn't exist! Lets not adopt their bad thinking, freedom to choose is good.

The simple fact is that Canonical is not on the same side as the rest of us- they stand on their own side alone. It would be fine if they decided to try creating something new if they weren't the dominant Linux distribution working against everyone upstream. They are effectively destroying choice for their users, creating an unnecessary division without a critical need to do so. In Canonical's perfect world, no one would be working on Wayland.

So yes, freedom to choose is good, and that's why Mir becoming dominant is bad- it will likely only support Unity, therefore wittling the choices down to one for the majority of Linux users, new and otherwise. Of course, you can say to just use something else, and I hope people do if they don't like this direction, but as it stands Ubuntu is still the only distro that seems to be 'made for human beings' (aside from elementary or Mint, of course- both Ubuntu derivatives). You can use Wayland on Ubuntu, obviously, but people tend to avoid the spin-off distros.

Also, your comparison of Mir to something like Kwin is totally off. Mir is more like an X11 replacement (a display server, as you say). Of course, under Wayland compositors like Kwin and Mutter take more of the responsibilities a display server has traditionally had, but that doesn't make it similar in any way to Mir. The architecture is quite different, and Kwin and Mutter are not becoming display servers, nor were they ever.

I think it's important not to tout freedom of choice or bring up natural selection in something so context sensitive as desktop software. Regardless of whether Canonical says they're trying to provide users more options, their actions have been effectively removing flexibility and choice for a long time. For the most part, it's harmless, but Mir is a much more fundamental proposition, and can do much harm if the social situation isn't handled delicately. Suffice it to say that Canonical doesn't care about being delicate, but they are very serious about being dismissive of those who are worried about what they're doing.

I'm still not incredibly worried, but I think we shouldn't fool ourselves into assuming Ubuntu and Canonical can only do good for the community. The lack of nuance in these discussions suggests that Ubuntu users are simply trying to convince themselves that everything is okay, since they've invested so much.

[volca]

Just imagine the mess, every othe major game dev bringing games to linux focusing Ubuntu/Mir, making other distros in tough situation (It may be easy then to make other distros not compatible). I guess we'll see mir translation layer for wayland soon after both mature.

[tjaalton]

What you are saying would be true if Canonical:
* actually brought some real advantage with Mir, or
* made Mir follow the standard, or
* add a wayland-mir translation layer to enable wayland apps to run on Mir or vice versa, or
* updated existing apps and desktop environments to support Mir as well.
Unfortunately, Canonical did nothing from the above and left it up to the community to sort out the mess and make sure Ubuntu is compatible with non-Ubuntu Linux. So, in short: Yes, Mir should just die because it's negatively affecting everyone.

Less BS please. There are no "Wayland apps" or "Mir apps", the support is in the toolkit (Qt, GTK+) and assuming apps use those they are fine running on both. Mir support for the toolkits are being written by the C folks:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/06/ubuntu-devs-demo-gtk-apps-running-mir-unity-8

Qt support might already be upstream, not sure.

[magika]

Less BS please. There are no "Wayland apps" or "Mir apps", the support is in the toolkit (Qt, GTK+) and assuming apps use those they are fine running on both. Mir support for the toolkits are being written by the C folks:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/06/ubuntu-devs-demo-gtk-apps-running-mir-unity-8

Qt support might already be upstream, not sure.

Everything that has to do with Mir gotta be downstream, as this is just a toy of a single distro.

[TheSoulz]

Everything that has to do with Mir gotta be downstream, as this is just a toy of a single distro.

Correct if im wrong but MIR is not just ubuntu's "toy" everyone is welcome to use it.
even unity 7 wich is more complicated to "port" is open to everyone.

[dh04000]

Michael "Clickclickclickbait! Super click bait nerd rage combo finish!"

[erendorn]

Correct if im wrong but MIR is not just ubuntu's "toy" everyone is welcome to use it.
even unity 7 wich is more complicated to "port" is open to everyone.

Given the CA, the poor API promise, and the fact they said MIR wasn't made to be implemented by other, well, no, everyone is not welcome to use it.
It's open source, so you can reimplement it. But it is really not made and managed with that possibility in mind.

[erendorn]

Because MS doesn't use open formats, they create unfair monopoly since the users are bound to their office suite.

openness of a system yaknow (no sh*tty MS business model) :]

MS uses open formats

[maskimummu]

Wayland has succeeded seeing how it's in tv's, phones, desktops, tablets, car's, and more Wtf? are they talking about help wayland succeed it is far past that

Brand names or it didn't happen.

[blackout23]

No, Wayland need extensions on top of EGL and I guess the same is true for Mir.

They are already part of EGL 1.5. There are wayland platform extensions in the upstream spec.