Mir Developer Hopes Community Will Use It & Add Wayland Compatibility

[bregma]

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.

That fact speaks volumes. Mir is an excellent piece of software and fills a role, and it's OK that there is choice and freedom in the world. The Mir developers are some of the smartest. most capable engineers I've ever had the pleasure of working with and their embrace of the product is not to be undervalued.

It's easy enough to judge from a position of ignorance, especially with the quantity of disinformation available on this subject through social media where your ignorance is as valuable as my facts.

Unity 8 is a wonderful evolution of Unity, and having used Unity for several years I find the old Windows-95-based GUI shells awkward and inefficient (I have never really used Windows, so the fundamental paradigms of start buttons and nested menus and hidden RMB clicks and filling the screen with control areas instead of content seems unnatural to me). If someone wants to rearchitect and rewrite the 80-90% of Unity 8 that is not the graphical skin so that it will work without Mir, UAL, and the rest of the stack that makes a desktop environment I'm all behind it, at least in an enthusiasm sense.

Mir is also free to fork or package for other distros at any time. It's GPLv3. That's how Free software works.

[duby229]

That fact speaks volumes. Mir is an excellent piece of software and fills a role, and it's OK that there is choice and freedom in the world. The Mir developers are some of the smartest. most capable engineers I've ever had the pleasure of working with and their embrace of the product is not to be undervalued.

It's easy enough to judge from a position of ignorance, especially with the quantity of disinformation available on this subject through social media where your ignorance is as valuable as my facts.

Unity 8 is a wonderful evolution of Unity, and having used Unity for several years I find the old Windows-95-based GUI shells awkward and inefficient (I have never really used Windows, so the fundamental paradigms of start buttons and nested menus and hidden RMB clicks and filling the screen with control areas instead of content seems unnatural to me). If someone wants to rearchitect and rewrite the 80-90% of Unity 8 that is not the graphical skin so that it will work without Mir, UAL, and the rest of the stack that makes a desktop environment I'm all behind it, at least in an enthusiasm sense.

Mir is also free to fork or package for other distros at any time. It's GPLv3. That's how Free software works.

I think it's pretty obvious that with Canonical leading the way, there was no chance at all for Unity8 to develop into a competitive product. The whole design was obviously anti-competitive. Every design phase was augmented by decisions that made Unity8 harder implement, harder to package, even harder to philosophize. The whole point all along the way was to make Unity8 impossible to compete with, but what actually happened is that it made Unity8 impossible to compete at all.

edit: The problem with Ubuntu for Canonical is that Ubuntu -is not- the market leader Canonical thought it was. They thought they could make it as anti-competitive as possible and by shear force of market direction Ubuntu would make it the defacto standard. They were wrong. Unity8's anti-competive design philosophy mixed with Ubuntu's lesser than expected market influence is actually what happened.

[GreatEmerald]

Back to the actual topic: what Griffiths says actually makes a lot of sense. If Unity 8 is so tied to Mir, and Mir is dead in the water, then rewriting Mir to be a Wayland compositor is the easiest way to actually have a somewhat maintainable Unity 8. Of course, that will make Mir tied to Unity 8, but let's be honest, it was never meant to be anything but tied to Unity 8... In that sense, Mir will disappear as a concept, since it will just become an actual part of Unity 8. Sounds like a reasonable plan for those who actually want Unity 8.

[srakitnican]

That fact speaks volumes. Mir is an excellent piece of software and fills a role, and it's OK that there is choice and freedom in the world. The Mir developers are some of the smartest. most capable engineers I've ever had the pleasure of working with and their embrace of the product is not to be undervalued.

In ideal world there would be a single manufacturer of GPU-s with three models of device, and all three devices may be made to work with whatever new display server arise. I am not an expert, but somehow I think that is the tricky bit. Can you elaborate the hardware support issue since you seems to know more?

[anarki2]

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."

So what? That's exactly what open source warriors are pointing at constantly. Use the source! lol

[Guy1524]

I am curious about how integrated GTK and Wayland

[Azrael5]

I hope ubuntu will disappear together mir.

[pal666]

Does Mir offer anything that Wayland doesn't?

c++11 codebase. this is big one, but it can be applied to wayland without any mir

[pal666]

Yes. Mir offers a display server, Wayland offers a way to talk to a display server.

you could phrase it better as "mir has only one implementation of display server". now it doesn't sound like an improvement

[pal666]

There is no one now starting to contribute to ex-canonical projects when they dont require the CLA anymore. So long for the "honest" Linux-"Community".

because only idiot would work on project dumped by its authors.