Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Mir Gets Automatic Probing For Input Platforms

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Mir Gets Automatic Probing For Input Platforms

    Phoronix: Mir Gets Automatic Probing For Input Platforms

    Ubuntu developers working on the Mir display server have been continuing to land more improvements to this X11/Wayland alternative although there hasn't been too much to report as of late for significant feature additions...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I still don't understand why canonical is making Mir to begin with... Why not just stick with their initial plans of using Wayland and contribute to that project to accelerate it's developments, that way we would have an X11 replacement much, much sooner... This is nothing but duplication of effort, and it will only complicate things for developers to need to consider supporting both wayland and mir, instead of having just one new target to deal with.

    I mean if they had problems with Wayland they could have just suggested changes and discussed it. Like the whole shell intergration thing (which seems to be the only reason I've been able to find that is solid for them wanting to stay away from wayland. It is a very very minor reason though... And I wholeheartedly disagree, I think shell intergration should be handled and extensible in the protocol rather than being handled by the WM, because Linux has never had the solid shell intergration possibilities that Windows and OS X have because there is no common shell across desktop environments, and no way to add shell intergration features unless you only support specific WMs... which is just absurd! and was okay back in the early 90s, but not so much in the 2000s. Functions like right clicking the desktop to access the nvidia/amd/intel control panels, or WinRAR's add to archive shell extension, or file extraction, these kinds of things NEED to be possible to implement independent of WM, I didn't even know wayland was trying to fix this problem, but it makes happy; unless I'm completely misunderstanding what they mean by shell intergration in this context, which would make me sad.)
    Last edited by rabcor; 26 November 2015, 01:03 AM.

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by rabcor View Post
      I still don't understand why canonical is making Mir to begin with... Why not just stick with their initial plans of using Wayland and contribute to that project to accelerate it's developments, that way we would have an X11 replacement much, much sooner... This is nothing but duplication of effort, and it will only complicate things for developers to need to consider supporting both wayland and mir, instead of having just one new target to deal with.

      I mean if they had problems with Wayland they could have just suggested changes and discussed it. Like the whole shell intergration thing (which seems to be the only reason I've been able to find that is solid for them wanting to stay away from wayland. It is a very very minor reason though... And I wholeheartedly disagree, I think shell intergration should be handled and extensible in the protocol rather than being handled by the WM, because Linux has never had the solid shell intergration possibilities that Windows and OS X have because there is no common shell across desktop environments, and no way to add shell intergration features unless you only support specific WMs... which is just absurd! and was okay back in the early 90s, but not so much in the 2000s. Functions like right clicking the desktop to access the nvidia/amd/intel control panels, or WinRAR's add to archive shell extension, or file extraction, these kinds of things NEED to be possible to implement independent of WM, I didn't even know wayland was trying to fix this problem, but it makes happy; unless I'm completely misunderstanding what they mean by shell intergration in this context, which would make me sad.)

      just another technology, just another technology to choose,,..
      why not?
      they simple choose to make another X11 replacement
      welcome to free world

      Comment


      • #4
        They're a company, and a very rare type of company at that, going this route will add to the costs of ridding ubuntu of X as they are planning compared to the cost of doing it in collaboration with the wayland devs which are not on their payroll. It's not that they weren't free to do this (obviously they were) it's that it's not a very professional choice, especially since they don't seem to have any real reason for not just rolling with Wayland. Their only statement on their decision of not using wayland sounded rather much like this "We decided not to use Wayland because stuff..." I'm pretty sure that their deal really is that they wanted to have their own windowing protocol with them as the lead developers (i.e. their project where they have the final say in what gets merged and what doesn't with the code; yes I am suggesting Canonical might be control freaks, that's how it seems to me anyhow, but that's just what it seems like to me) I'd be surprised if their real problem with wayland isn't that they don't have and can't have absolute control over the project like they can with their own Mir. Wayland is getting more and more momentum whereas Mir still has none, Mir right now doesn't even have a point; and by the looks of it the only one to ever use Mir will be canonical (and it's DE, Unity). Everybody else is right now well on their way to supporting Wayland if they don't fully support it already (like Qt5 and EFL do)

        RIght now as far as I can tell, seems like Canonical is just making Mir for teh lulz. And I don't see it becoming relevant in the near future; wayland however is already halfway towards becoming relevant. This might create a divide in Linux later down the line between "Wayland programs" and "Mir programs" and how they're not cross compatible, the only way this can end well for everyone is if it's a minimal and super easy effort to support both at once or if they are cross compatible (i.e. mir can run nested inside wayland with no performance loss, and wayland can run nested inside mir with no performance loss, the only cost would be slightly increased CPU use, but who cares with the CPU power computers have these days?)
        Last edited by rabcor; 26 November 2015, 06:40 AM.

        Comment


        • #5
          Afaik developers shouldnt care too much whether its Wayland or Mir, toolkits should take care of that. I have seen a video with GTK applications running natively on Mir since GTK+ has Mir support. XMir will enable x86 applications to be run on Ubuntu phones, there are already early demos. Also both Wayland and Mir depend on EGL drivers so supporting both for AMD, Nvidia and Intel should not be difficult. However I dont think we will see either of them fully replacing X.org anytime soon. In one or two years maybe.

          Comment


          • #6
            My guesstimations would suggest that Wayland will start to gradually take over X around Q3 2016 or so, Gnome (It's 3.10 we're waiting on 3.18) will probably have full support for it by then, Enlightenment might also possibly have full support for it by then (these two are very close) KDE will be very close to (or finished) fully supporting wayland and Linux Mint's developers will probably be just about starting their port of MATE to Wayland at the same time. I am also guessing that Wayland will be able to fully replace X by 2020 with all applications natively supporting it (i.e. no need for xwayland anymore except for legacy applications that don't get updated much. Like skype...)

            As for Mir's situation... I don't know what to guess, I'm with the Kubuntu devs that Canonical seems to be taking Ubuntu into an "Apple" direction of being an isolated OS to the point where you can't really call it Linux anymore (i.e. they might be trying to become to Linux what OS X is to BSD... an abomination...) and you can see others announcing dissatisfaction with Canonical's decision (like Intel devs removing XMir support from their linux drivers because they just don't like where Mir is going)

            Mir is largely a fork of Wayland, but the thing is that Wayland is being actively developed by highly experienced X11 developers, Mir on the other hand.... developed by Canonical's devs which are of unknown caliber (decent, but they don't exactly have experience in this department, not like the guy who wrote AIGLX who is Wayland's lead dev...) I just don't know what to think, I can't even comprehend the reason behind Mir... But I hope that either Ubuntu's popularity finally dies off (maybe in favor of Mint, that would be nice, although they do have some improvements to make in their proprietary drivers support department, getting them to work on Mint is a total pain), or they stop being so stubborn and just cancel Mir and use wayland like everybody else. Of course, the world isn't a nice place so this is only wishful thinking, neither of these things will happen, because things never go the way they should in this world.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by miskol View Post
              just another technology, just another technology to choose,,..
              why not?
              they simple choose to make another X11 replacement
              welcome to free world
              Because it is at such a low layer. Yet another thing different between distributions. Theoretically something else will hide this for you. But in practice: some things on Wayland don't work like on X11. Some applications show bugs on Wayland, not on X11. Mir is yet another layer which could have bugs.

              It results in more work not just for toolkit developers or Canonical. So a big -1 from me.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Cerberus View Post
                Afaik developers shouldnt care too much whether its Wayland or Mir, toolkits should take care of that. I have seen a video with GTK applications running natively on Mir since GTK+ has Mir support. XMir will enable x86 applications to be run on Ubuntu phones, there are already early demos. Also both Wayland and Mir depend on EGL drivers so supporting both for AMD, Nvidia and Intel should not be difficult. However I dont think we will see either of them fully replacing X.org anytime soon. In one or two years maybe.
                How about those toolkits? Are they going to develop themselves or is canonical going to commit to them? Did they ever do something good for upstream? How about fragmenting an already small userbase? This isn't another another toolkit being available or an alternative, this is something that's going to be indirectly forced upon lots of users, something that divides the linux world further. What about window managers and anything else that won't be supporting both? This is not about more choices, this is about less choices depending on whether you use Mir or the Wayland protocol.

                What about game developers (looking at steam)? We already know not all of them use sdl and quite a lot of them are going to keep developing that way, do you expect them to support both? Or maybe a lot of devs will keep relying on X for the programs due to both Wayland and Mir having support for X through xwayland/xmir effectively crippling both of them and postponing the replacement of xorg.

                What does Mir offer to anyone other than Canonical? Nothing really and I don't see what it offers them either, all they did was post a shitty excuse trying to hide their crap stating they had reasons for going with Mir and how wayland didn't suit them without actually explaining anything or sharing a reasonable reason for doing so. Wayland was already tested in the mobile world at the time, they have no excuse for that, they just want to control everything themselves.

                Canonical wishes to split Ubuntu from the linux distro world, that we already know. I hope they either realize their mistake and revert back to the wayland plans (nah) or get stoned to death. Written from a Sway Wayland session.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by rabcor View Post
                  Mir is largely a fork of Wayland
                  Mir isn't a fork of Wayland it's a completely different codebase.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by rabcor View Post
                    I still don't understand why canonical is making Mir to begin with... Why not just stick with their initial plans of using Wayland and contribute to that project to accelerate it's developments, that way we would have an X11 replacement much, much sooner... This is nothing but duplication of effort, and it will only complicate things for developers to need to consider supporting both wayland and mir, instead of having just one new target to deal with.

                    I mean if they had problems with Wayland they could have just suggested changes and discussed it. Like the whole shell intergration thing (which seems to be the only reason I've been able to find that is solid for them wanting to stay away from wayland. It is a very very minor reason though... And I wholeheartedly disagree, I think shell intergration should be handled and extensible in the protocol rather than being handled by the WM, because Linux has never had the solid shell intergration possibilities that Windows and OS X have because there is no common shell across desktop environments, and no way to add shell intergration features unless you only support specific WMs... which is just absurd! and was okay back in the early 90s, but not so much in the 2000s. Functions like right clicking the desktop to access the nvidia/amd/intel control panels, or WinRAR's add to archive shell extension, or file extraction, these kinds of things NEED to be possible to implement independent of WM, I didn't even know wayland was trying to fix this problem, but it makes happy; unless I'm completely misunderstanding what they mean by shell intergration in this context, which would make me sad.)
                    2 years later again the same question. Seriously?

                    They/You/I are/are/am FREE to develop/support whatever they want. They are free to choose and history and only history will judge them from their results.

                    Thats my opinion.

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X