Mark Shuttleworth Makes More Comments On Ubuntu GNOME, Mir, Convergence

[eidolon]

We have a problem in the community when people choose to hate free software instead of loving that someone cares enough to take their life's work and make it freely available.

So in other words, the open source community is "quite a sick place to be in"?

While I agree with Mark that disagreements can be needlessly hateful (personal, vitriolic, and emotionally-charged) and there can be a fair bit of histrionic bellyaching, he has engaged in tribalism himself (and yet ostensibly bemoans tribalism). He may feel his/Canonical's input is misunderstood or not given fair consideration by some (e.g. GNOME, Red Hat, KDE, etc.), but to flip that around, I'm not certain that he fully understands or appreciates where other parties are coming from either. He is Ubuntu's SABDFL, no one else's.

To the degree that cooperation might be frayed (supposition), perhaps this can offer the opportunity for a 'reset', although, admittedly, I'm not optimistic.

[littleowl]

I have feeling that he starts blaming the Linux community for his own failures and ill decisions he has made. A wasted opportunity to settle things down.

[bregma]

I didn't read all of the Posts before.

Ah. This is someone Too Important To Bother then. Very well, carry on...

[ ... 4 points elided I can not comment on because I do not have actual facts available, and one missing point ... ]

6. XMir is a fork of XWayland

XMir shares no code and no history with XWayland. Anyone can write a wikipedia article, including teeth-grinding triggered agenda pushers, but the code doesn't lie.

7. There were about to use libinput for mir, The wiki artikle said wayland hasn't the right input feature (e.g.: 3d mouse) and security issues of X. Now there using libinput.

About to? Mir has been shipping with libinput for quite some time. Libinput didn't exist when the Mir project was started, so it used evdev directly, just like x.org did. There is no shame in adopting good libraries. None.

8. There said mir is able to use android blob dirver, wayland was first with libhybris.

Mir uses the Android drivers. It also uses libhybris, and contributed a lot to upstream because it encountered a lot of problems in production. Nothing wrong with being a good free software citizen and contributing back code, unless you're Canonical and you're the target of a hater.

9. Before the public release of mir, mark said there will go with wayland.

Before the development of Mir, Canonical participated in the development of Wayland. When it became more advantageous to create their own compositing display manager, Canonical moved its Wayland devs over to Mir. The Central Committee did not approve of that that as a part of their continuing five year plan, but Canonical shipped phones and tablets and Mir has been ready on the desktop for a few release cycles now. It doesn't sound like an unreasonable decision to me. Ubuntu also ships Wayland, so you have the choice.

IMHO: The comunication with the community was realy bad. They should learn to work with the community.

What do you guys think?

I think you need to read the article and all of the posts, maybe get your facts straight, and perhaps think about why you think it's so important to you that someone else does what you want with their time and money.

[bregma]

The NIH syndrome is one of the advantages of open software. It's the reason why we have so many options in open source and not in proprietary. Canonical's long list of failed attempts is a sign that it's willing to embrace new ideas, which is a good thing not a bad thing. So even though you don't like Mir you shouldn't hate Canonical for attempting, especially that they were attempting to solve an issue not being solved by anyone else in the open source community, which is convergence. I'm personally glad that Mir is finally dead, but if Mir succeeded and Wayland was the one that was put to rest I would've been equally happy.

While I agree with your sentiment, I'd like to point out that Mir is not "finally dead." Do read the article, it's not that long.

[TheBlackCat]

So even though you don't like Mir you shouldn't hate Canonical for attempting, especially that they were attempting to solve an issue not being solved by anyone else in the open source community, which is convergence.

First, you don't need Mir to do convergence. Wayland can do it just as well. Second, not only is convergence "being solved" by someone else in the open source community, namely the KDE Plasma developers, they were solving it long before Canonical or Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon.

[TheBlackCat]

Mir uses the Android drivers. It also uses libhybris, and contributed a lot to upstream because it encountered a lot of problems in production. Nothing wrong with being a good free software citizen and contributing back code, unless you're Canonical and you're the target of a hater.

What was wrong was Canonical presenting Android compatibility as an advantage of Mir over Wayland and presenting it as their own development, to such an extent that the libhybris developer criticized them about it.

[cynical]

I have feeling that he starts blaming the Linux community for his own failures and ill decisions he has made. A wasted opportunity to settle things down.

Not wasted at all. It's a great opportunity to speak honestly about the Linux community's toxicity. It's important to acknowledge problems if they are to be eventually fixed. It's amusing to me to see so many people bring up Mir as though that was the breaking point. There was hate for Canonical long before Mir was ever an idea; the display server was merely the rallying point for the mob, just as systemd still is for a certain section of the community. I'm curious where the pitchfork mentality comes from. Maybe entitlement? Maybe power hungry losers who require all attention to be on their chosen projects, their way of doing things. It would explain all the accusations of Mark trying to get power over the community through Mir... that would be the psychological projection of the petty onto their enemy. They want control over the community to focus on their issues, so clearly Mir must be Mark's attempt to do the same.

[leipero]

I'm curious, why do you think Wayland isn't there yet, when Fedora is already shipping it? Granted, it's just one distribution, but others will follow.

it simply isn't, on some machines I've tried it, performance is very poor compared to X, apart from EDID problems (rare, but still present problem to this day), performance problems on lower end hardware (maybe more), it's not fully functional yet, X is very old, and it's very polished, wayland have much work left, sure Fedora ships it by default, as an matter of fact, Arch (GNOME 3) default option is wayland also for both GDM and Shell, so that's 2 distributions (if you can apply "distribution" to Arch, depending on your definition), but Fedora is "test distro" for RHE, and Arch is Arch, they just strictly follow "vanilla" software (that's why i use it), Others will follow, I expect wayland to be default maybe in Ubuntu 19.10 or latter, because my personal view for Ubuntu LTS is that they should keep X as default untill wayland matures, for the sake of compatibility and usability in general.

[shmerl]

Hey Mark. How about admitting, that Mir actually was harmful in a number of ways to Linux desktop in general? It created an unnecessary rift. What stopped you from using Wayland for your graphics and compositing needs? You never admitted your initial assessments of Wayland were wrong.

It's not about hating Mir or issues of "mainstream". It's about being critical of efforts which are actually damaging the progress. If anything, Wayland is the mainstream, not Mir by far.

[sarmad]

First, you don't need Mir to do convergence. Wayland can do it just as well. Second, not only is convergence "being solved" by someone else in the open source community, namely the KDE Plasma developers, they were solving it long before Canonical or Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon.

Is KDE's mobile Plasma meant to provide convergence in the sense that you dock your phone and it dynamically adapts to the new setup, or is it just two independent builds, one for mobile and one for desktop?