Mir Developer: Anyone Interested In Native Wayland Clients In Mir?

[Pajn]

Not only is this not true for Kwin, but Kwin is being used by another DE, lxqt.

I said "pretty". Lxqt can use Kwin under X11 but not under Wayland. Also KWin is not designed for such use, it's just that you can do it instead which is a whole lot different than both LibWayland, Mir and QTWayland.

[bregma]

IF (that is still a pretty big if though) Canonical does have paying customers for Mir and will continue to maintain it, Mir do have better backing as most red hat sponsoring goes into Mutter and not Libweston.

This brings up one very important argument in favour of Mir over the plethora of competing composting display servers being offered as choices: indemnity.

If some corporation wants to add a graphical display to their microwave (in Soviet Russia, YOU watch microwave!), they're going to want someone to sue when something goes wrong. Who offers indemnity for Weston? Not Red Hat or Intel, they're very careful to keep at arm's length. For Mutter? Not Red Hat, they take great pains to be at arm's length. For KWin? I don't even know. But it's my bet Canonical offers indemnity for Mir.

Ultimately, all the competing compositing display managers are technically equals. Technical counts for nothing as soon as the lawyers and actuaries get involved.

[littleowl]

Mutter and Kwin is both pretty specific to their own desktop environments

The same can be said about Mir.

[littleowl]

This brings up one very important argument in favour of Mir over the plethora of competing composting display servers being offered as choices: indemnity.
....
Ultimately, all the competing compositing display managers are technically equals. Technical counts for nothing as soon as the lawyers and actuaries get involved.

Having experience with software development according ISO 26262 and IEC 62304, I have serious doubts that Mir has been developed as safety critical software.

[Pajn]

The same can be said about Mir.

No, Mir is designed to support multiple DEs. Even MirAL does support multiple kinds of environments, for example tiling which Unity does not use.
I presume this is for the IOT stuff, but I don't know. However Canonical have for pretty long focused on support for many kinds of environments.

[cb88]

The best option is to throw Mir under the bus.... and extend libweston untill it does all you need and either use libweston-desktop or implement your own compositor as a thin layer on top of libweston.

Then everyone benefits... that is the entire point. Deleting cruft is a good thing... and at this junction Mir is pure cruft.

[littleowl]

No, Mir is designed to support multiple DEs. Even MirAL does support multiple kinds of environments, for example tiling which Unity does not use.

The last Mir release, I spent some time on, was ~0.19 and I had feeling the design decisions are pretty Unity centric. Anyway, I am not afraid that we will not have enough of Wayland compositors. I would bet more on Weston which *is* a reference and has support of various SoC manufactures.

[Slartifartblast]

This is one of those instances where less is more, RIP Mir.

[ldo17]

For the life of me I am at a loss to figure out how much effort could be wasted in display server development and protocols when Quartz/Quartz Extreme [Display PDF, etc] developed for as Display Postscript at NeXT [alum here] and later at Apple [alum here], but then I look back to the original development of X versus NeXT Display Postscript and NeXT WindowServer both proven to be light years ahead of MIT-X and can't imagine after nearly 33 years it has taken this long to realize your designs were failures.

It certainly has taken a long time for the X camp to realize that simplicity lies in a dumb server, with all the sophistication at the client end.

But Display PostScript (and Sun’s NEWS) was part of that mistake, too.

[ssokolow]

They never wrote a patch for KWIN. The maintainer (Martin Grässlin) wrote only, that he wouldn't accept patches for Mir.

I stand corrected. Thanks.

I must've read about it during one of the times when I was sleep-deprived out of my mind. That always makes a wreck out of my reading comprehension and memory.