Unity 8, Mir Changes Landed Last Week

[Pajn]

This is never going to happen:

1. NONE of the major upstream desktops (gnome, kde etc...) have expressed any interest in Mir. The two major desktops (gnome and KDE) already have plans in place to use wayland, and there has already been much work done (unlike an untrue comment I saw earlier in this thread that insinuated that no one had plans to use wayland). Gnome plans to have partial wayland support by 3.10 and a full port by 3.12, KDE is also actively porting Plasma/kwin to wayland.

If the upstream desktop does not support mir, than the distros won't either. Distros will use whatever upstream uses for a display server, no distro would want to maintain a fork of gnome or kde that has mir support, it would be insane.

Mir will likely only be used by ubuntu and possibly a few ubuntu derivatives (but so far no ubuntu derivatives have shown any interest in mir.)

Its pretty obvious how this will play out. Ubuntu will use Mir, and other distros will either use wayland or X.

No, Gnome and KDE have plans for when they will support Wayland (which is good, a DE shouldn't do anything more than that).
But no one actually have plans for when to use Wayland. Even Wayland itself may not be ready for full use by the time
Canonical have plans to only use Mir.

Mir will be usable April 2014. Canonical are going to make sure it is even if that means hiring Developers to work on it 24/7.
Because if it isn't done by them others are going catch there lead in coverage and their golden opportunity runs away.

Wayland will be usable when it is. No one is rushing it to be done earlier than that. And with the goal of having a perfect API
it will take some time, that is truth.
Developing software for todays needs (Mir) is easy, developing software for tomorrows needs (Wayland) is very difficult.

Of course no one other than Canonical cares for Mir right now. Canonical upset a lot of people when they presented Mir
and Wayland is a better choice in the long run. But when Mir is ready and Wayland isn't I guess at least some people will
look towards Mir and compare it with the development of Wayland. Because at some point you get tiered of waiting for
the perfect thing when a good one is already available.

[Vim_User]

So your only source is an unaffiliated blog which doesn't even cite where it got that statement from?
The link it has in that section doesn't state anything about breaking compatibility.
Long shot and full of FUD.

Only the Christopher Halse Rogers, the one who wrote that blog post, is a Mir developer. I see how unaffiliated that is.

[Vim_User]

Unity requires GNOME

I would like to know where this comes from? I looked at the dependencies of the Unity packages and I can't see anything Gnome related in there.

[akincer]

I get amused by the things coming from both "sides" of this discussion.

It's pretty clear Canonical doesn't really care if any other distros use Mir or not. They're going their own way for their own reasons. The venture will either prove successful for THEM or not. If other distros (Ubuntu derived or otherwise) run with it, then they'll just get some additional bug reports which isn't a bad thing. If none do, they still won't care.

Whether or not it ever becomes technically superior or equal to Wayland is totally irrelevant. It only needs to meet the needs of Canonical and be functional in a way that makes its use transparent to their user base. The sideshow discussions are a total waste of time, storage and bandwidth.

[seb24]

I get amused by the things coming from both "sides" of this discussion.

It's pretty clear Canonical doesn't really care if any other distros use Mir or not. They're going their own way for their own reasons. The venture will either prove successful for THEM or not. If other distros (Ubuntu derived or otherwise) run with it, then they'll just get some additional bug reports which isn't a bad thing. If none do, they still won't care.

Whether or not it ever becomes technically superior or equal to Wayland is totally irrelevant. It only needs to meet the needs of Canonical and be functional in a way that makes its use transparent to their user base. The sideshow discussions are a total waste of time, storage and bandwidth.

Oh one smart message in 5 pages... I agree. I hope to see the 2 project succeed.

[johnc]

I would like to know where this comes from? I looked at the dependencies of the Unity packages and I can't see anything Gnome related in there.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so sloppy. What I mean to say is that the Unity experience today is a shell of the GNOME desktop environment. I don't think they intend that to be the case long-term.

[Vim_User]

What I mean to say is that the Unity experience today is a shell of the GNOME desktop environment.

But shouldn't it in that case have Gnome dependencies?

[bwat47]

No, Gnome and KDE have plans for when they will support Wayland (which is good, a DE shouldn't do anything more than that).
But no one actually have plans for when to use Wayland. Even Wayland itself may not be ready for full use by the time
Canonical have plans to only use Mir.

Mir will be usable April 2014. Canonical are going to make sure it is even if that means hiring Developers to work on it 24/7.
Because if it isn't done by them others are going catch there lead in coverage and their golden opportunity runs away.

Wayland will be usable when it is. No one is rushing it to be done earlier than that. And with the goal of having a perfect API
it will take some time, that is truth.
Developing software for todays needs (Mir) is easy, developing software for tomorrows needs (Wayland) is very difficult.

Of course no one other than Canonical cares for Mir right now. Canonical upset a lot of people when they presented Mir
and Wayland is a better choice in the long run. But when Mir is ready and Wayland isn't I guess at least some people will
look towards Mir and compare it with the development of Wayland. Because at some point you get tiered of waiting for
the perfect thing when a good one is already available.

Fedora plans to USE it by default by fedora 21: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/piper...ch/180546.html

Other distros will follow suit (obviously more bleeding edge distros like fedora will be the first to use it by default). Saying that no distros have plans to use it is incorrect.

[johnc]

But shouldn't it in that case have Gnome dependencies?

I believe Unity is implemented as a compiz plugin, but gnome-session is launched by lightdm as the session manager and there are a lot of gnome processes running in the background.

I know compiz could traditionally run on a variety of DEs, but I think in this case it's running on GNOME. I don't think there are any code dependencies though.

[Vim_User]

I believe Unity is implemented as a compiz plugin, but gnome-session is launched by lightdm as the session manager and there are a lot of gnome processes running in the background.

I know compiz could traditionally run on a variety of DEs, but I think in this case it's running on GNOME. I don't think there are any code dependencies though.

OK, that makes perfect sense.