Mir Developer Hopes Community Will Use It & Add Wayland Compatibility

[blackout23]

http://m.slashdot.org/story/208643

"Lead Mir Developer says Mir more relevant than Wayland in two years."

Well that didn't happen....

[GI_Jack]

His reasons for recommending "Plan 1" in this article is that Mir is a good piece of software. But guess what, so is Wayland.

The original reason Canonical wanted to develop Mir was that they said that Wayland had issues with its input on touch devices which have since been debunked. Can anyone give me any actual good reason for Mir to exist?

Because Canonical likes making in house tools that no one else uses. I'm still kinda mad at them over this. Wayland was in its infancy when they started developing MIR, and their reasons for developing MIR were that wayland wasn't being developed fast enough, along with issues you've already cited.

In the mean time, Wayland has come to fruition before MIR did, and the community could have used canonical adding their efforts to wayland instead of making yet another dead end project like bazaar.

But yes, since they started writing MIR, wayland devs wrote libinput, which has proved itself to be the superior input library for both X11 and Wayland.

That's what Unity 8 was, basically porting Unity 7 to newer tech. Trying to port Unity 7 to Wayland is not at all feasible. I feel the same way about Gnome, guess I will give it another try and maybe see if KDE does it better now. Really wish I didn't have to though...

I am running gnome on wayland with an intel GPU on Arch linux right now, and it works flawlessly. I didn't even notice it for a while as it is the default option. Not sure about other GPUs though

[rtfazeberdee]

Wayland is not all roses, like many are trying to portray it, just today on reddit some dev complained about it https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comme...eed_to_change/

if you want to read one person opinion, read the comments in response - here's one i picked
"The TL;DR is that he wants to write a toolkit (or a compositor?) and is pissed that it's not simple. There should be a library that does exactly what he wants but there isn't and every question he has should be answered just the way he thinks about the problem but it isn't. And that's of course Wayland's fault."
If you read down the comments, he reduces his argument to "bad documentation".

[rtfazeberdee]

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Mir, not to fork it.

Nice one

[sverris]

...
In the mean time, Wayland has come to fruition before MIR did...
...

Wayland has made its way, but Mir too. Unity is a widely used as a DE - AND is running on some touch/mobile devices (even with 'convergence', to some extend quite well).

Focus should be now: how to combine the best of both...

[anarki2]

Just the average identity crisis of "freedom of choice" warriors: they wanna solve problems that don't exist. Yeah sure, why don't we add a compat layer to Wayland? Why not support 3 display servers in libraries, frameworks and apps simultaneously?

For what, really? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

[Herem]

It's difficult to feel sorry for the Mir devs. They had to know what kind of software they were working on all along. I, for one, hope that Mir will end buried deep at the abandonware junkyard and we will all be using Wayland-based desktops in 2018.

When you are employed by a company you work on the projects you are given towards the company's goals. You can't just say you're not working on a project because someone else is already working on a similar solution.

Most of these developers are now being made redundant, a little empathy wouldn't hurt.

[duby229]

Does Mir offer anything that Wayland doesn't?

Mir is a server - client model, wayland is a protocol - protocol implementation model.

[ssokolow]

One person complaining on reddit doesn't mean that there's an issue. If you'd go by Reddit (specially r/linux), everything is utterly terrible and everyone should be hated/slamed, etc.

I do have to agree with the "lack of documentation" part though.

I and a friend have both tried to attain more than a cursory understanding of how Wayland works and the documentation seems to be stuck in a state of "we're too busy working to ship it to find time to document it properly".

That was fine while everything was in flux, but not as excusable now that the core protocol has hit v1.0.

Heck, some of the commenters on that post are actually saying "I had to write Wayland-speaking code for work... I had to resort to reading the Weston source to figure out how it works."

[MadCatX]

When you are employed by a company you work on the projects you are given towards the company's goals. You can't just say you're not working on a project because someone else is already working on a similar solution.

Most of these developers are now being made redundant, a little empathy wouldn't hurt.

I'm pretty sure that every Mir developer was skilled enough to leave Canonical and find another job anywhere else with ease if they felt like their work might have been going into a project with no future. And yes, they actually *could have* said that all work they'd spend or Mir would be redundant and waste of Canonical's resources. However, the devs' personal feelings about this are of little concern. What concerns me a lot more is the idea that Mir may be zombified as a bunch of compatibility layers in software that actually will become the standard in the future Linux desktop. Being fully aware that I'm being a bit of an asshole here I really hope that nobody will go along with neither "plan 1" or "plan 2" and Unity 8 either dies along with Mir or gets ported to Wayland.