Mir Developers See The Door, No Commits In A Week

[bkor]

I was just commenting on how mir and unity came into existence. Look at all the new desktops that came into existence because of gnome3. lol

Mir has NOTHING to do with GNOME 3. Unity 7 was started because they wanted to go their own way. Mir was meant to be used with Unity 8, NOT Unity 7! Why? Still don't understand. After the scrapping they're now talking about Mir somehow supporting Wayland clients or something. Entirely confusing situation.

Anyway, you did NOT comment on how Mir came into existence. That's a case of ?!?!? because I still don't understand why it is needed (except control maybe).

Note that Unity 7 relies on quite a fair bit of components hosted at git.gnome.org.... it is pretty pointless to seek hostility between GNOME 3 and Ubuntu. It's like people expecting KDE and GNOME developers to dislike each other.

[starshipeleven]

I was just commenting on how mir and unity came into existence. Look at all the new desktops that came into existence because of gnome3. lol

Yeah, and all of them have their own display server, no wait...

You got me on a technicality.

It's not a technicality, it's the part that makes them different from everyone else, which makes your argument invalid.

Mir was built to work with unity they were suppose to be packaged together. They just wanted their own desktop and their own display server that they could control.

And I'm just saying that there was no good reason to have full control over a display server unless you were on a serious power trip. How many distros have forked X in the last decades because they wanted control over it?

I remember ubuntu even had issues with natilus having features removed faster than they could be patched back in.

And? This does not justify making a new display server.

[starshipeleven]

Oh noes. A whole week?
Come on Michael, I don't mind the occasional click bait, but you're better than this.

Too little hate towards Mir detected in this post. Please hate Mir more. Let's keep Phoronix great.

[TheBlackCat]

I can understand why they created mir. The wayland community in large didn't want to commit the changes cannonical felt they needed for use on phones and the like, so their alternative was to either create a fork of wayland or write something new,

Please name the specific features you are talking about here. I have never seen this provided by Canonical as a justification for Mir. Wayland was used successfully on phones for years before Mir. And Wayland has an extension system specifically so DEs like Unity can add the DE-specific features they need. So please explain exactly what you are talking about.

And please don't mention "android driver support", because Mir only had that thanks to Wayland. They used libhybris, which was developed for Wayland and worked well on Wayland long before Mir even existed.

[ResponseWriter]

At first I was a little bothered by the end of support for Ubuntu Touch but today I encountered one of the same bugs I've encountered for at least a year where the music player simply refuses to play anything at all until I run `pulseaudio -k`. It's been months since I got the feeling any useful improvements were happening at all.

The Ubuntu Phone and convergence could have been a great product and I really wanted that to happen but it's been hard to see any real progress in actually getting there.

[DIRT]

Mir has NOTHING to do with GNOME 3. Unity 7 was started because they wanted to go their own way. Mir was meant to be used with Unity 8, NOT Unity 7! Why? Still don't understand. After the scrapping they're now talking about Mir somehow supporting Wayland clients or something. Entirely confusing situation.

Anyway, you did NOT comment on how Mir came into existence. That's a case of ?!?!? because I still don't understand why it is needed (except control maybe).

Note that Unity 7 relies on quite a fair bit of components hosted at git.gnome.org.... it is pretty pointless to seek hostility between GNOME 3 and Ubuntu. It's like people expecting KDE and GNOME developers to dislike each other.

People already stated that mir was planned to be used on phones and tablets instead of xorg or wayland. They did want control of the display server so they won't ever get the rug pulled out from under them if there was a sudden change they couldn't control. Or shiny new phone drivers for their display server to work with.

Lots of these new desktops use the gtk took kit. They were still born out of people not liking gnome3. That isn't creating hostility. Not like gnome 3 would work on a phone anyway.

Yeah, and all of them have their own display server, no wait...

It's not a technicality, it's the part that makes them different from everyone else, which makes your argument invalid.
And I'm just saying that there was no good reason to have full control over a display server unless you were on a serious power trip. How many distros have forked X in the last decades because they wanted control over it?

And? This does not justify making a new display server.

They didn't trust the community to be reliable enough. They wanted to control their own stuff. (also they could possibly charge for their own stuff?) Imagine if you are trying to build a phone interface and basic tools like a file manager keeps having features patched out of it. It makes you second guess depending on open source. Gnome apps were changing too much. They applied the same logic to the display server. Think about all the new drivers it would need to support on phones.

Mind you I don't speak for Canonical.

[srakitnican]

I think Canonical should write their own kernel so that it supports Mir, Canonical can't rely solely on community. Since it likes do the things its own way it mind as well rewrite everything from scratch. While it is there it might as well not call itself a Linux distro anymore to avoid confusion with the rest of the community.

[pal666]

The wayland community in large didn't want to commit the changes cannonical felt they needed for use on phones and the like,

bullshit, wayland ships on phones for many years. reality is: canonical devs had not enough skill no understand wayland and canonical management wanted vendor lockin as usual.

so their alternative was to either create a fork of wayland or write something new

as i already said it was not the case, but even if it was, how fuck it is easier to write something new than to fork wayland?

I'm quite happy with them doing the later.

so you deserve failure

[TheBlackCat]

People already stated that mir was planned to be used on phones and tablets instead of xorg or wayland.

Wayland supported phones and tablets years before Mir. And there was nothing about the architecture of Mir that makes it any more suitable for phones that Wayland is. There were a couple claims about that when Mir was first announced, but it turns out Wayland already supported the features Canonical needed and had for a long time so Canonical withdrew those claims (and every other claimed benefit of Mir over Wayland, all of which turned out to be wrong).

They did want control of the display server so they won't ever get the rug pulled out from under them if there was a sudden change they couldn't control.

Wayland guarantees backwards-compatibility of the protocol, server API/ABI, and client API/ABI so there isn't any chance of that.

Or shiny new phone drivers for their display server to work with.

From day 1 they used stuff developed for Wayland to handle those drivers. The android driver support came from Wayland. The graphics driver and kernel support came from Wayland. Everything Mir has in terms of phone support comes from Wayland. So that logic doesn't work either.

They didn't trust the community to be reliable enough. They wanted to control their own stuff. (also they could possibly charge for their own stuff?) Imagine if you are trying to build a phone interface and basic tools like a file manager keeps having features patched out of it.

It is easier to maintain your own file manager than your own display stack (not just the display server, the entire stack associated with it).

[boxie]

I told everyone back in 2010 that shuttleworth was a snake oil salesman.

So.. wrong then and still wrong now?