MATE Developers Are Considering Mir-Over-Wayland

[fuzz]

A lot of good work went into Mir. The blog posts about it are quite interesting. Mir was never just a wayland replacement. The client side parts of it are still relevant.

[tigerroast]

I read the title and and all I could think of whas, "Huh?!!?" In the end though, this kind of makes sense. MATE has no Wayland compositor.

The whole point is to have someone else develop the compositor, so the only work to be done is have Mir work on MATE with little-to-no issues. Mutter is out of the window because MATE devs hate GNOME 3. Qt-based compositors are a big no for obvious reasons. No other small DE's window manager has made or can make as much progress in this regard, and since MATE devs love riding the coattails of controversy (/s), Mir becomes a pretty obvious choice.

Besides, choosing Mir will allow MATE to keep its forked window manager and not throw away years of work on it. At the very least, MATE is at least open to the idea of running Wayland, and is nowhere near as pig-headed in this regard as Cinnamon.

[starshipeleven]

WAT?!

So you say that porting Mir to Wayland is still easier than making a compositor from scratch? That's nice.
Now go in the same cell as UBPorts guys and start hacking, my slave.

[profoundWHALE]

I'm not sure about porting, but if the UBports port it, then MATE shouldn't have any issues with it

[torsionbar28]

MATE is betting on Gnome 2 and Mir, a schoolboy would make better decisions imo.

Way to confuse the argument.

1. MATE's raison d'être is the GNOME 2 desktop metaphor - it's precisely why MATE is so popular. IMO it's the most usable and unobtrusive desktop out there. Nobody asked for the clunky Gnome3/Windows10 speak-n-spell interface, it got foisted on users by overly creative devs. The resurgence of "classic" desktop environment metaphors is why MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE, and LXDE have become so popular in recent years.

2. Sounds like they're exploring the possibility of using Mir code. That's a far cry from "betting" on Mir, unless you're in the FUD business.

[dragon321]

Use Mir with wrapper to Wayland? Lol - completely no sense.

They can use or fork Mutter, Weston or just use libweston and write compositor without thinking about low level code. Everything is better than using Mir, which is almost dead and no one cares about it (well, Canonical cares).

[Luke]

Wasn't it disagreement over exactly that point that resulted in both MATE and Cinnamon existing?

That actually exists, I think GNOME calls it the classic mode or some such thing, and gnome-shell frippery enabled much of that all the way back in 2011 shortly after GNOME 3.0 was released. I used gnome-shell frippery for years, then switched to Cinnamon because I could get everything into one panel. Only thing is, gnome shell did use and Cinnamon still uses a directory full of js scripts to set up the DE. That is painfully slow, as JS was never meant to run an entire desktop environments.

Thus my switch to MATE. If you want a traditional DE, why not use code meant for that job rather than meant for another, different job with bolt-on changes? MATE is C code which is compiled once, then run without further compilation required. Right there you pick up a lot of speed. The GNOME 2 code never had to support integrating the main menu and an overview into the window manager, so code in GNOME 3 that is redundant for a GNOME 2 mode is avoided altogether.

MATE does the same job as Cinnamon (especially with recent versions) or GNOME with classic mode/frippery but with far lighter code actually designed for the job. No matter how big your system, you are saving CPU cycles and probably electricity as a result. Not much power savings per user, but multiply by millions of computers and it adds up.

[BwackNinja]

I'm glad that these MATE folks know what they're talking about with regard to what Wayland and Mir are.

I also really wish people would stop using the phrase "runs on Wayland." It is a vague statement that is at best only ever relevant when talking about an application or toolkit and otherwise serves to keep the masses confused unlike a more specific phrase like "supports the Wayland client protocol".

"Just port to Wayland" is a similarly troubling statement because people seem not to understand that hardware backends are necessary, like GBM or EGLStreams. Wayland is something you implement, but displaying on the screen requires much more than that.

People are just getting riled up that their favorite buzzwords aren't being used. They only know and revere those words because someone much more competent than them used them once. Then they use only that to determine that the person speaking must not know what they're talking because that's all they've got. We've got a cargo cult trying to decide the fates of projects. That's terrifying.

[starshipeleven]

We've got a cargo cult trying to decide the fates of projects. That's terrifying.

Are you somehow implying that the peanut gallery has any decisional power? Let them chirp, lol.

[cl333r]

Way to confuse the argument.

1. MATE's raison d'être is the GNOME 2 desktop metaphor - it's precisely why MATE is so popular. IMO it's the most usable and unobtrusive desktop out there. Nobody asked for the clunky Gnome3/Windows10 speak-n-spell interface, it got foisted on users by overly creative devs. The resurgence of "classic" desktop environment metaphors is why MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE, and LXDE have become so popular in recent years.

2. Sounds like they're exploring the possibility of using Mir code. That's a far cry from "betting" on Mir, unless you're in the FUD business.

Exactly. Trying to go the Gnome 2 and Mir way is stupid. You don't seem to understand it.