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

[GreatEmerald]

Well I don't get it. For years the resident haters were whining "Drop Mir and Unity, use Wayland! Wayland Wayland Wayland!". So now that Canonical did exactly that, they should be happy that they got their wish, shouldn't they? Of course not. It's just another round of Canonical hate because reasons. I bet that if Shuttleworth announced that he will send a million dollars to every Linux user out there, they would rant how evil he is for excluding *BSD.

That is a very unrealistic depiction of the situation. Your so-called "resident haters" are very happy with the news. What they are not happy with is MS (and you) calling them names.

Cutting words out of context doesn't mean you understand what you are reading. What you did is called manipulation, as the original sentence is much longer wise guy.

Actually, the term is "quote mining".

[starshipeleven]

Not wasted at all. It's a great opportunity to speak honestly about the Linux community's toxicity.

What's up with you guys, ever seen all hate on Windows in the post Win8 years?

[GreatEmerald]

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?

The idea has always been dynamic adaptation. Back in Plasma 4 days even, if you installed it on a netbook, you would get the netbook interface by default. You can switch to the desktop Plasma 5 in the options, though.

The problem was still that while plasmoids adapt very well so such different form factors, apps themselves do not. That's the reason why they started the Kirigami initiative, so that an app could morph depending on whether it's on mobile or desktop, while looking native on both. Sort of like responsive design, but hand-optimised for the specific form factors (see https://techbase.kde.org/Kirigami).

[Kano]

Basically I first thought that Unity was meant for mobile devices only - after i attended a speech from Mark at a LinuxTag some years ago.

It is very hard to convince users to switch to use mobile code on desktops - that's why Win 8 was not successful at all - Win 10 is improving - ok, it is a free upgrade, just like Linux but more successful.

Mark thinks that his ideas are great, but creating something new is not always the best solution. Mir was more or less doomed years ago - there must be a reason why Intel rejected Ubuntu's patches in 2013. Sometimes it is better to improve existing systems - investing time/money into Wayland might have been a better way.

Unity was designed as an OSX clone with some icons on the left - some OSX clone settings have been in Ubuntu before with GNOME 2 - position of buttons, app title on top. I don't see any increase of productivity by using this compared to KDE or other DE. If I want to use a Mac, then I use OSX (or MacOS) but not Ubuntu. The only "missing" feature was the dock.

There are certainly some very nice things that Ubuntu developed, like the kernel team is usually doing a great job, but I don't understand why it was needed to introduce so many changes to the graphics stack that using Ubuntu X packages on Debian is only possible with bad tricks. Also KDE is somehow always packaged differently (ok, only an indirect Ubuntu problem). The PPAs are great, but why is it not possible to build packages for Debian? Even OpenSuSE can build Debian packages! Ubuntu devs are often Debian devs as well but i really think that Ubuntu should give up the exclusive changes that break compatibility. The Ubuntu main repository is very small anyway compared to universe which is mainly a sid snapshot.

So my ideas for Ubuntu would be: go back to more Debian style packaging! Open PPA for Debian stable/testing. That would not interfere with the idea to create a great distro for Linux users.

[bregma]

Oh, but it really is dead.

Read the article that this forum is the comment section for.

[leipero]

Show me the numbers.

Ok, let's not go to the path of ripping things out of context and arguing..., I can show you how performance is lower by videos and (probably) gallium HUD, but what's the point? Could you help?

[bregma]

No, they dropped initial support code. That's not the same as maintaining it. And while strictly speaking they didn't cancel Mir, it's now relegated to IoT where the maintenance burden is much, much smaller than that of a desktop. It's easily doable for Canonical now.

We sent more patches upstream just last week. That's active maintenance, but since the APIs have been stable for a couple of years there isn't a lot of churn. You're grasping at straws looking for flaws.

Why do you think a maintenance burden would be lower for a project just because a week has passed? The code is the same code.

Uh, no. Just pointing out that one post or another is "hate" is passive-aggressive AKA feeding the trolls. It's not constructive and doesn't make those you quoted any more likely to change how they are expressing themselves, but rather makes them snap back at you. Which you then use to reinforce your view that someone is a hater, even though you were the one who provoked such a response.

Some of the first few posts in this thread were the kind of explicit toxic hate that Mark was talking about. I'm not being passive-agressive if I acknowledge that "fuck MIR and unity" is unencoded hate language. That people like me are "idiots" and "stupid." I've known hateful angry bullies all of my life, and I know ignoring them never makes them go away.

I really do get it. They hate.

[e8hffff]

Face the fact that Mark has given up on Unity simply because the phone success is an uphill battle due to driver access. Google has a monopoly on mobile phone hardware drivers and source code. The various ARM licensees simply aren't open and that means Ubuntu Phone will always be suppressed. Unity has its roots with phone functionality and convergence even though its life was out on the desktop first. With Mark walking away from Ubuntu Phone means Gnome has more validity for the desktop.

[Ranomier]

[...]
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.
[...]

I looove facts. So please correct me.
How did canonical contributed to wayland? (Please send links, too)

And i don't like negative emotional outbursts. Please stay with facts

[Azrael5]

Ok, let's not go to the path of ripping things out of context and arguing..., I can show you how performance is lower by videos and (probably) gallium HUD, but what's the point? Could you help?

if you learn about how wayland works rather x11 you understand the reason it is better (wayland allows to remove 2 steps to do the same work), so it is more efficient. If ubuntu developers had took wayland as the base to pursue the operating system they desired to get, they had got it without wasting time to get an exclusive software so to get an exclusive operating system working on both mobile and desktop environment; besides there are standards which are good not only because of preferences but also for objective nature of the hardware and the monitor. The best layout is to optimize the use of one only taskbar provided by its main menu, instead of filling the monitor of independent taskbar which reduce the space of visual or generate overlap of taskbars (see for example what happen using another program as the browsers matching those kind of linux distros used to have the above taskbar or lateral taskbar; yes the taskbar can be hidden but every time the cursor stays near the border the system taskbar appears overlapping the other. Here the reason why unity is not good: 2 useless bars also if one is enough to make the same things; bad position of the taskbars (left and above).

So what are or were the weaknesses of UBUNTU?
1) mir;
2) desktop layout;
3) wasting time of development.