Canonical Is Planning For Vulkan Support In Mir By Ubuntu 16.04

[bregma]

They had a lot of complaints about Wayland design decisions when Mir was first announced, which ended up all being wrong. To this day, Mir devs haven't been able to actually explain architecturally how Wayland doesn't fit their needs.

The goals of Wayland did not match Canonical's goals, and there were indeed disagreements with implementation details. You may label those as complaints, but it does not mean disrespect for the developers or even for the goals and implementation details. It's quite possible for both projects to have different goals, to have competent developers, and to create good things; I do believe the developers of both projects respect and appreciate the work the others are doing. The world needs more good things like that, but of course you're free to disagree.

Uh, Xwayland? And libhybris was developed specifically for Wayland. libinput may be a different project, but it was designed as part of the general replacement of X11 like Wayland, and making their own input handling system was originally one of the explicit reasons why Mir was started.

Mir does not use XWayland at all. It's not clear why you think it would. XWayland is not a part of Mir. XMir, a separate project that supplies an x.org server that uses a Mir client for a back end, does not use XWayland at all. Maybe you're confused because they both start with the letter X?

Libhybris is a replacement for libc built on the Android Bionic runtime and came out of the Meego project. It is used by all sorts of software projects, among which is a Mir back end designed to run on an Android kernel. Wayland also did the same thing. Libhybris is not a part of Wayland.

One of the reasons for using Mir instead of X11 was the input system. Canonical was aware of the replacement input library project, respected and acknowledged the developer as a leader in the field, and had confidence that Libinput would be the best tool for the job. It is, and it's used by Mir, Weston, x.org, and other projects. It's good to be able to choose the best tools to meet your needs, and to not choose those that don't.

Mir has not borrowed components from Wayland nor does it use Wayland internally.

They said it would be used in production on Unity desktop a couple of years ago. That didn't happen, then they kept pushing the release where it would happen back further and further. X11 was supposed to be gone from Unity by 2014. It is now 2016.

I was using Mir on the desktop a couple of years ago: my unity8-desktop-session package that lets you run a Unity 8 desktop session on Mir has been available in the Ubuntu archives since 14.04. Mir has been ready for production use on the desktop for a while. It's also been shipping in production devices you can go and buy and use out of the box and has been doing so for a year.

It's true that the nVidia and AMD binary blob proprietary video drivers do not support Wayland and Mir yet. That's not the fault of either Wayland or Mir and as soon as those third-party products are ready, Mir and Wayland will just work.

It's also true that Ubuntu is not shipping Unity 8 as the default desktop because Canonical learned from the original switch to Unity that sometimes it's better to get it right first. It's not because Mir is not ready, and the Unity 8 desktop is just one Mir client.

Fun fact: Ubuntu has been shipping on devices with no X11 at all for over a year.

[unixfan2001]

except in this case the "standard" is (perceived as) much more of an "arbitrary" (and, lets say it, very geeky starting with the very name, straight out of Aliens and the Wayland Yutani corporation) one rather a formally blessed one with a strong organization behind it...

Errr. You might want to look up Wayland, MI...