Future Plans For Ubuntu's Unity Still Being Discussed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Future Plans For Ubuntu's Unity Still Being Discussed

Following word earlier this week that "Unity Next" is being written in Qt/QML and that this next-generation Unity desktop will run on the Mir Display Server and be a converged user-interface from phones and tablets to the Ubuntu desktop, more of Unity's future was talked about at the online UDS...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMyMDI

[uid313]

Mir only?

Is Unity-next for Mir only?
Or will it work on X and Wayland too?

[Anarchy]

Is Unity-next for Mir only?
Or will it work on X and Wayland too?

Qt is Qt everywhere. If they don't do anything stupid it should be quite easy to make it run under wayland. But, again, nobody knows until we see the code.

[coder543]

Is Unity-next for Mir only?
Or will it work on X and Wayland too?

It should be able to run X apps seamlessly within Mir, so it will be designed for Mir only. Whether other people port it to X or Wayland is up to them..

and as I'm in before the trolls, can we please relax on all the trolling? Ubuntu is a great product, and the developers work hard on it. Switch to something else if you want to complain.

[Luke_Wolf]

It should be able to run X apps seamlessly within Mir, so it will be designed for Mir only. Whether other people port it to X or Wayland is up to them..

and as I'm in before the trolls, can we please relax on all the trolling? Ubuntu is a great product, and the developers work hard on it. Switch to something else if you want to complain.

What trolling? Canonical has just shoved a knife into the community's back and the community is angry about it. Do you truly believe that just rolling over and not responding is an appropriate response to what they've done?

Once more people aren't angry about Mir being created, they're angry about Why Mir was created.

[coder543]

What trolling? Canonical has just shoved a knife into the community's back and the community is angry about it. Do you truly believe that just rolling over and not responding is an appropriate response to what they've done?

Once more people aren't angry about Mir being created, they're angry about Why Mir was created.

The only knife they've shoved was the one where they blamed Wayland for things that were not problematic, and they've since retracted that statement.

I would hardly call it rolling over to ignore what's been done, as they are not impacting any other distros only themselves. If it works you up, then move to something else, but getting angry about it will have no good outcomes. "If you kick a stone in anger, you'll hurt your own foot. ~Korean Proverb"

If you think Mir sucks and should die immediately, then make it so. Build a better platform than Ubuntu. There certainly seem to be enough upset people in the community. Upset for no real reason, in my opinion, as no damage has been done to you.

[Luke_Wolf]

The only knife they've shoved was the one where they blamed Wayland for things that were not problematic, and they've since retracted that statement.

I would hardly call it rolling over to ignore what's been done, as they are not impacting any other distros only themselves. If it works you up, then move to something else, but getting angry about it will have no good outcomes. "If you kick a stone in anger, you'll hurt your own foot. ~Korean Proverb"

If you think Mir sucks and should die immediately, then make it so. Build a better platform than Ubuntu. There certainly seem to be enough upset people in the community. Upset for no real reason, in my opinion, as no damage has been done to you.

I am on something else, a mix of Fedora, openSUSE, and Slackware and have been so for a long time because Ubuntu's brokeneness and fugly themes drove me off of it 2 years after I was initially introduced to linux on it. However they are impacting things because the damage that FUD created is already done, it can't really be retracted. You can't take back words in truth even when you retract them. Now wayland has a stigma and a bunch of Ubuntu fanboys running to Canonical's defense isn't helping the matter. Meanwhile Canonical's lack of honesty is also continuing to not help matters, instead of just coming out and saying "Okay, we're doing this because we want a codebase we can control" they're continuing to act like there's a technical argument behind what they've done which it's been proven to be not the case. Which continues to implicitly put down wayland.

[coder543]

I am on something else, a mix of Fedora, openSUSE, and Slackware and have been so for a long time because Ubuntu's brokeneness and fugly themes drove me off of it 2 years after I was initially introduced to linux on it. However they are impacting things because the damage that FUD created is already done, it can't really be retracted. You can't take back words in truth even when you retract them. Now wayland has a stigma and a bunch of Ubuntu fanboys running to Canonical's defense isn't helping the matter. Meanwhile Canonical's lack of honesty is also continuing to not help matters, instead of just coming out and saying "Okay, we're doing this because we want a codebase we can control" they're continuing to act like there's a technical argument behind what they've done which it's been proven to be not the case. Which continues to implicitly put down wayland.

The number of people who actually even know what X does, is a very small group. The number of people who know about Wayland is even smaller. The number of people who heard the FUD and understood it is so small, that it honestly impacts nothing. Those who are empowered to choose Wayland are the people who maintain distros. The users don't care. Unless those people are fickle enough to be affected by a little retracted FUD, this will have no impact on anyone. No one wants to keep X, so unless everyone jumps into the boat with Canonical on Mir, how can this possibly impact anyone? There are very few ways. You overestimate how many people understand what a display server is, and that is the source of your anger. I'm hardly a Canonical fanboy, but you're getting bent out of shape over something so small. There are much bigger problems in real life to worry about.

[Luke_Wolf]

The number of people who actually even know what X does, is a very small group. The number of people who know about Wayland is even smaller. The number of people who heard the FUD and understood it is so small, that it honestly impacts nothing. Those who are empowered to choose Wayland are the people who maintain distros. The users don't care. Unless those people are fickle enough to be affected by a little retracted FUD, this will have no impact on anyone. No one wants to keep X, so unless everyone jumps into the boat with Canonical on Mir, how can this possibly impact anyone? There are very few ways. You overestimate how many people understand what a display server is, and that is the source of your anger. I'm hardly a Canonical fanboy, but you're getting bent out of shape over something so small. There are much bigger problems in real life to worry about.

Not quite because the number of people who know about wayland is certainly larger than 3 otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion, now if you're talking people who know about X that's a different matter. And you do realize that that same argument could be used about Steve Ballmer's FUDing against Linux right? "Oh most people don't even know what linux is so why should you care? there are bigger problems in life to worry about"

Ultimately Canonical is playing very foul and people are angry because of it, and it should be made note that this is far from the first time. So there's absolutely nothing wrong with people being angry at them for doing that, anymore than you yourself going against .NET because you don't like Microsoft's actions. I'll argue legal and technical issues but there's absolutely nothing wrong with people being angry at a company.

[scionicspectre]

Hah, so anyone who disagrees with decisions made by the Ubuntu camp are now trolls? That seems a bit unfair.

These decisions affect the entire desktop Linux community, since Ubuntu has a majority market share. It's not like the people behind openSuSE or Fedora want this dependence on Ubuntu for success. But Ubuntu does have some responsibility not to destroy the software stack without a good reason. I just think these changes are ill-advised, and we're going to run into a lot of trouble having an open ecosystem with people focusing on a heavily patched distro. The extreme case would be something like OS X, where you clearly cannot run Mac DMGs unmodified in FreeBSD.

I like Ubuntu and what is has done to popularize free software, make no mistake. But I hope these changes don't threaten compatibility with other distributions in the future. Luckily, most app developers are aware of the issues and likely wouldn't make something that wouldn't work outside of Ubuntu's Mir/Unity combo. It's just dangerous to play with things like this, and if Mir isn't of sufficient quality, it will make Linux as a whole look bad, even if the rest of us advocate for more mature and portable display alternatives, like Wayland.