LXDE-Based Lubuntu Will Not Ship Mir Display Server

[Vim_User]

but a developer's role is to develop solutions, and his refusal to develop (or integrate) solutions to these problems cannot be explained by purely technical terms.

A developers role is only to provide solutions for his project, not for downstream projects. Of course this can't be explained purely by technical terms, it was a practical decision of the kwin and KDE developers not to accept distro-specific patches, long before Mir even existed. This not a political stance against Mir, but it has a political component: The unreliability of Canonical. Supporting Wayland, then coming up with Mir. Making accusations about Wayland, back-paddling when refuted. Announcing that the Mir APi can break at any time, just to the needs of Unity, now stating that the API will be stable. Which engineer or developer with a sane mind would believe the things Canonical say they would do under that circumstances? They have lost their credibility with their recent actions, IMHO, and it seems that some developers (I don't speak specifically about Martin Gr??lin here) see it the same way.

[mrugiero]

It's also important to note that compositing does not mean any requirement for 3D-accelerated OpenGL drivers.
It was only Weston (not Wayland) that required 3D drivers in the past but even that is gone: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/it...s-1779133.html

At least KWin 5 will support software rendering under Wayland as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V8i8zZPzbU

Yes, I thought someone already said that, that's why I didn't mentioned it. Sorry if I was mistaken.

so anyone thinks that is still just about technical arguments and not about politics and business competition from the big companies behind the distributions?

GTK people already stated they will revise (and accept if they find it to be in conditions to and there's a compromise to maintain it) patches to upstream, so other user's speculation should be the least you should care about.

The technical challenges presented by Mir's development model have been explained by concerned developers many times now. However, I can't help but shake the feeling that these challenges are easily surmountable with sufficient motivation. After all, developers are engineers, and solving technical problems is what engineers do best. Ultimately, every time I read Martin Grasslin complaining about Mir, I keep getting the impression that his anti-Mir stance is mainly fueled by politics. I don't mean to say that Martin's concerns are invalid, or that overcoming these challenges is as easy as a snap of the fingers, but a developer's role is to develop solutions, and his refusal to develop (or integrate) solutions to these problems cannot be explained by purely technical terms.

It can. A developer's role is to develop solutions *to problems*. As long as Mir doesn't give something Wayland can't give, he has *no reason* to support it, because there's *no problem* to solve. Is there a policy involved? Yes, it is. Is that policy a *politics* thing? Maybe, but the explanation given makes enough sense to believe that. Limited resources, limited developers, means they need to choose priorities. And favoring a single distro just because, when their solution does about the same thing the solution they were already working on, is a setting incorrect priorities. Other reasons, such as the problems it implies to test their changes were mentioned as well. Does he seem to have negative feelings against Mir? YES. I think he even stated it. But he also gave valid tech reasons, and people tend to ignore them and just tag all of it as an emotional and political rant, which is not. Note, too, that if you were in his position, where Shuttleworth makes a compromising statement about your project when you aren't even sure it can be supported on Mir, you will probably be angry, too.

Personally, I am very upset at the direction Canonical decided to go. I feel that Canonical's decision to develop a competing display server when Wayland was already in development fragments the community and divides projects. Thus, I believe that Canonical's decision is causing damage to the community. I believe that Canonical's decision was driven by business rather than technical considerations. I believe that the lack of cooperation Canonical is facing from the rest of the community will cause financial harm to Canonical. I believe that Canonical's decision was selfish, and I believe that the community response will cause this selfish decision to backfire.

I mostly agree, at least until a real technical reason why Mir really solves a different problem or solves the same in a significantly different way. On the other hand, the possibility it was a business decision doesn't bother me by itself, but the fact they won't admit it (and invent tech facts that get refuted) and that fragmenting the community because of that decision would be a direct contradiction to their speech if it was only business.

Thus, on a personal level I approve of the lack of outside support, and occassionally outright hostility, that Canonical is having to deal with. I don't think that Red Hat is behind any of this. I get the impression that the amount of influence Red Hat has over GTK and Wayland development is very minor. However, I also believe that whatever influence Red Hat does have, Red Hat earned through years of paying some developer salaries. Considering that Novell and Mandrake / Mandriva used to do the same but eventually found this difficult to sustain, Red Hat's behavior becomes even more admirable in retrospect. Canonical had the same opportunities to be involved in GTK and Wayland development, and had been urged by outsiders to contribute more, but most allege that Canonical has traditionally kept this involvement minimal. Now, Canonical is reaping what it has sowed, and in my mind, this is all fair and good. (Also, I hate adware, so I always enjoy a company that develops adware get kicked in the shin.)

I partially agree. I don't approve the lack of support as is. Specially at the toolkit level. Even though I think Mir is a bad decision overall, not having the toolkits supported upstream only hurt the users in a direct way, and this hurts all of the community. If people start seeing it as some users on this forum (a bunch of angry nerds who doesn't want Linux to be used by the masses) that's bad PR for the whole community, and this could make hardware support and market share to suffer, at the very least. I approve the lack of support for desktops. They have no reason to. If you want to use KDE, you can use it on Wayland, and if Ubuntu doesn't test their package, well, that's really Ubuntu's problem. But toolkits lack of support means you can't use most of your software if using vanilla Ubuntu.

But in the end, I still think that the community response against Canonical and Mir is motivated by ideological rather than technical reasons, and on some level this causes me some shame, as I consider myself to be a part of this community. I don't think that the community should be more receptive of Mir, but I do think that we should at least call it what it is: political concerns, not technical ones.

There are surely some ideological oposition, but most is the lack of technical reasons to fragment the desktop. Or at least, that's what people state, and nobody was able to point a technical benefit of Mir over Wayland. Fragmentation *is* a technical problem, I don't think I have to explain why. When it's for no technical benefits, then you have technical reasons why it's plainly a bad decision.

Qt's development, on the other hand, is controlled by a for-profit company, not a community. I would be extremely surprised if Digia denies Canonical assistance in upstreaming Mir support, especially if Canonical offers to do most of the legwork.

I don't think they'll deny this, and I don't know where the idea of Digia ignoring Canonical came from. As I already said, Qt does have reasons to support as many windowing systems it can, because not doing so actually implies a loss for both Digia and Canonical users. For KDE and other desktops, it changes nothing.

Edit: I also want to add that I realize Canonical is a business that has the right to decide where to spend its money, but I think what people overlook is that Canonical owes a debt to the community for providing the bulk of the stack that Canonical has built its business around. Canonical does not need to contribute back - the license terms do not mandate reciprocation - but what stings the most about this is that I think Canonical is actually hurting the community that it is in debt to.

I'm against the view of business as some entity allowed to do whatever they want. If they make a promise, they should keep it. They said they cared for the community, well, their word should bound them to. And they are not allowed to lie, either. They can invest in whatever they want, as long as they don't promise otherwise, but lying is unnecessary and problematic. If this is a *only business* decision, they should just tell that.

Its partially technical arguments, its also non-technical arguments as well. MIR does server side allocation because on ARM thats better, but on x86 its worse-- Canonical is betting ARM is the future, which is fine, but what if something supplants ARM and client-side allocation is better there? Wayland does client side because its the best choice for all architectures except ARM, where the loss / gain is minimal. Its being agnostic.

There's also the issue of the license, a lot of FOSS developers refuse to sign over copyright of their code out of fear that the new holder will close source the product. COULD Canonical do that? Yes. WILL they do that? We don't know, so far they havent had the power (and the balls) to take a jump like that.

There's also the issue that Canonical has stated that they ONLY care about Unity. ABI and API breaks will come at the behest of the Unity team, if they break KDE, or Gnome, or XFCE in the process then thats their problem. Wayland promises API stability for 1.x.x and I believe ABI stability for 1.1.x (ABI is in the same situation as Xorg is right now so thats not a change)

As with client and server side decorations, Wayland doesn't *mandate* client side allocations. That's one of the problems, that this whole *we need server side allocations* assertion doesn't contradict in any way the *we could use Wayland* assertion. The client where it's *mandated* to do the allocation is any client. Wayland doesn't mandate a client-server architecture, so anything but the protocol are called clients in some way, because they're protocol's clients. You can make your system compositor a server and make it do the allocations, so clients (for your server) doesn't need to make the allocations.

As for the license, they can't close source the original free one, they can only make closed source derivatives (it was already analyzed on another thread), the same as everyone with MIT. The license issue would actually be strictly political, because the only concern is that not everyone has the same rights. But there is no risk of losing Mir because of the CLA.

[Ericg]

As for the license, they can't close source the original free one, they can only make closed source derivatives (it was already analyzed on another thread), the same as everyone with MIT. The license issue would actually be strictly political, because the only concern is that not everyone has the same rights. But there is no risk of losing Mir because of the CLA.

True that they can't close the already open code, but they CAN decide that Mir 1.9.9 is open source and the Re-architectured Mir 2.0 is closed source and also incompatible with Mir 1.9.9. Canonical has shown they don't exactly play fair OR make always smart decisions when it comes to Ubuntu so I'm not holding my breath. While I want to believe that Canonical doesnt have it in them to close-up Mir at some point in the future, Mark did say that Ubuntu was about making money first and foremost, so I don't really put anything past them... Greed makes people stupid.

[mrugiero]

True that they can't close the already open code, but they CAN decide that Mir 1.9.9 is open source and the Re-architectured Mir 2.0 is closed source and also incompatible with Mir 1.9.9. Canonical has shown they don't exactly play fair OR make always smart decisions when it comes to Ubuntu so I'm not holding my breath. While I want to believe that Canonical doesnt have it in them to close-up Mir at some point in the future, Mark did say that Ubuntu was about making money first and foremost, so I don't really put anything past them... Greed makes people stupid.

Yes, they can. They don't even need to re-architecture it, as long as they'd released every previous contribution in the previous version, with the previous license, and as long as this last open version keeps available. If they do that, they already kept their part of the contract.
But I don't think they will close it, though, because at the very least that would be very bad for their most basic marketing campaign (that little speech saying Ubuntu would always be free and all of that).
I do expect, however, their carriers to ship modified, closed source derivatives.

[Awesomeness]

every time I read Martin Grasslin complaining about Mir, I keep getting the impression that his anti-Mir stance is mainly fueled by politics.

I see no politics in https://plus.google.com/115606635748...ts/136nV4uojKH
OTOH Canonical?s ?political?/economic reasons are clear for everybody who?s not braindead: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html

I don't mean to say that Martin's concerns are invalid, or that overcoming these challenges is as easy as a snap of the fingers, but a developer's role is to develop solutions, and his refusal to develop (or integrate) solutions to these problems cannot be explained by purely technical terms.

It's downstream?s duty to integrate upstream, not the other way around.

I believe that Canonical's decision was driven by business rather than technical considerations. I believe that the lack of cooperation Canonical is facing from the rest of the community will cause financial harm to Canonical. I believe that Canonical's decision was selfish, and I believe that the community response will cause this selfish decision to backfire.

So, not blindly playing by Canonical?s rules is politically motivated instead of technically? Seriously: I don?t get your argument.
The KWin devs have been preparing for Wayland since at least 2011, maybe longer.
Even though my programming times are long over, I can clearly remember that programming ?if X do ? else do ?? code is an entirely different thing to do than asking for 3 or more conditions. As he explained in the G+ post, KWin is now being developed for 2 and only 2 display servers.
Since at least 2010 Canonical was telling everybody that Ubuntu will switch to Wayland: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

Fast forward to 2013 and suddenly everything said in the past 3 years is invalid, and everything said in the past 6 months even lies (because Mir was in development then already) but nonetheless everybody else is expected to support Mir.
Why is that? Why do only Ubuntu fans feel so especially deserving? No one every seriously cried that KWin does not support Android's SurfaceFlinger or OSX? Quartz.
If somebody asks Martin if KWin will natively support:
Android SurfaceFlinger,
OS X Quartz,
or Ubuntu?s Mir,
the reply will always be No. Not a single Android or OS X users would ever cry foul for that but all those whining Ubuntu fanboys do.

However, I also believe that whatever influence Red Hat does have, Red Hat earned through years of paying some developer salaries.

Red Hat has a good reputation because they do good community work and do not constantly try to screw everybody over.

Considering that Novell and Mandrake / Mandriva used to do the same but eventually found this difficult to sustain, Red Hat's behavior becomes even more admirable in retrospect.

Mandriva went bankrupt several times because the company was always led by idiots.
Novell had financial problems because A) they had to still support all their old Netware stuff (that costs money) and B) Novell bought Ximian before SUSE which meant that Microsoft fanboy Miguel De Icaza was in charge for all Linux decisions ? many that led to outcries in the community: First trying to completely ban KDE from SUSE Linux, then pushing Mono everywhere, later closing off Compiz development for the public, etc.

But in the end, I still think that the community response against Canonical and Mir is motivated by ideological rather than technical reasons, and on some level this causes me some shame, as I consider myself to be a part of this community. I don't think that the community should be more receptive of Mir, but I do think that we should at least call it what it is: political concerns, not technical ones.

Whatever? Canonical is trying to bullshit everyone else and the backlash is what they deserve for lying about Wayland?s allegedly inferior technology, trying to screw everybody over with their CLA Mir, etc.

Even if the backlash was solely politically motivated (although I already proved that there are also technical issues and getting pissed after being insulted is an emotional, not a political reason): There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The Free Software movement is a political movement! It is a democratic movement! And moving against a ?self-appointed dictator for life? is completely aligned with democratic goals.

Qt's development, on the other hand, is controlled by a for-profit company, not a community. I would be extremely surprised if Digia denies Canonical assistance in upstreaming Mir support, especially if Canonical offers to do most of the legwork.

Whichever plugins Canonical ever wrote for Qt (the first was appmenu-qt, QMir is just the most recent one), Canonical never ever tried to upstream anything of it. That would mean to hand over licensing authority to some else. Even worse: To an institution that has a long-standing contract that forever guaranties complete freedom for Qt (KDE Free Qt Foundation).
And no, Qt is not controlled by a company instead of a community. Ever since open governance Qt is a community project. Digia controls some aspects but not Qt in general.

[k1l_]

Its partially technical arguments, its also non-technical arguments as well. MIR does server side allocation because on ARM thats better, but on x86 its worse-- Canonical is betting ARM is the future, which is fine, but what if something supplants ARM and client-side allocation is better there? Wayland does client side because its the best choice for all architectures except ARM, where the loss / gain is minimal. Its being agnostic.

There's also the issue of the license, a lot of FOSS developers refuse to sign over copyright of their code out of fear that the new holder will close source the product. COULD Canonical do that? Yes. WILL they do that? We don't know, so far they havent had the power (and the balls) to take a jump like that.

we dont know if they do it doesnt mean they will do it. Everyone is talking as if canonical already did close MIR down. Licensewise you could even close MIT code down so other projects should be named with the same fear too, if you play fair on that against all. i think that closing-down sidedoor is needed to give mobile carriers the closed own version of that OS that they want to change for their needs. same situation on android. but that doesnt mean ubuntu will automatically close MIR down completly. I dont think you can go into the mobile market without that option for carriers.

There's also the issue that Canonical has stated that they ONLY care about Unity. ABI and API breaks will come at the behest of the Unity team, if they break KDE, or Gnome, or XFCE in the process then thats their problem. Wayland promises API stability for 1.x.x and I believe ABI stability for 1.1.x (ABI is in the same situation as Xorg is right now so thats not a change)

well yes, the main target for MIR is to be a fast displayserver for unity. but that doesnt exclude that other desktops can or will run on it. RAOF made some blog/g+ postings on that topics regarding backends for other desktops. that api and abi stability statement was redeemed last days (cant remember where i read that exactly) that they dont plan to change it everytime after they have settled it.


I think the problem in here is, that we have a range of possible decisions in the future for MIR. but instead of keeping them open or balance the arguments, a majority goes mad against ubuntu/canonical fed by some very few people with more than just technical intentions. i just think that most of the problems can be resolved once we calm down and come back to the technical point and dont dont think making money with a linux distribution is bad at all. just think of the other ones that make money with it and what we all gain from that.

[intellivision]

I see no politics in https://plus.google.com/115606635748...ts/136nV4uojKH
OTOH Canonical?s ?political?/economic reasons are clear for everybody who?s not braindead: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html



It's downstream?s duty to integrate upstream, not the other way around.



So, not blindly playing by Canonical?s rules is politically motivated instead of technically? Seriously: I don?t get your argument.
The KWin devs have been preparing for Wayland since at least 2011, maybe longer.
Even though my programming times are long over, I can clearly remember that programming ?if X do ? else do ?? code is an entirely different thing to do than asking for 3 or more conditions. As he explained in the G+ post, KWin is now being developed for 2 and only 2 display servers.
Since at least 2010 Canonical was telling everybody that Ubuntu will switch to Wayland: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

Fast forward to 2013 and suddenly everything said in the past 3 years is invalid, and everything said in the past 6 months even lies (because Mir was in development then already) but nonetheless everybody else is expected to support Mir.
Why is that? Why do only Ubuntu fans feel so especially deserving? No one every seriously cried that KWin does not support Android's SurfaceFlinger or OSX? Quartz.
If somebody asks Martin if KWin will natively support:
Android SurfaceFlinger,
OS X Quartz,
or Ubuntu?s Mir,
the reply will always be No. Not a single Android or OS X users would ever cry foul for that but all those whining Ubuntu fanboys do.


Red Hat has a good reputation because they do good community work and do not constantly try to screw everybody over.


Mandriva went bankrupt several times because the company was always led by idiots.
Novell had financial problems because A) they had to still support all their old Netware stuff (that costs money) and B) Novell bought Ximian before SUSE which meant that Microsoft fanboy Miguel De Icaza was in charge for all Linux decisions ? many that led to outcries in the community: First trying to completely ban KDE from SUSE Linux, then pushing Mono everywhere, later closing off Compiz development for the public, etc.


Whatever? Canonical is trying to bullshit everyone else and the backlash is what they deserve for lying about Wayland?s allegedly inferior technology, trying to screw everybody over with their CLA Mir, etc.

Even if the backlash was solely politically motivated (although I already proved that there are also technical issues and getting pissed after being insulted is an emotional, not a political reason): There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The Free Software movement is a political movement! It is a democratic movement! And moving against a ?self-appointed dictator for life? is completely aligned with democratic goals.


Whichever plugins Canonical ever wrote for Qt (the first was appmenu-qt, QMir is just the most recent one), Canonical never ever tried to upstream anything of it. That would mean to hand over licensing authority to some else. Even worse: To an institution that has a long-standing contract that forever guaranties complete freedom for Qt (KDE Free Qt Foundation).
And no, Qt is not controlled by a company instead of a community. Ever since open governance Qt is a community project. Digia controls some aspects but not Qt in general.

It looks to me that you're letting your emotions dictate your decisions, you're using a lot of emotive language in your post to get that point across.

[Awesomeness]

It looks to me that you're letting your emotions dictate your decisions, you're using a lot of emotive language in your post to get that point across.

Seems like you have no arguments ?

[intellivision]

Seems like you have no arguments ?

I don't want to get into an argument about anything, I'm just pointing out an obvious observation about the amount of emotive language in your post to see that you are in fact very passionate about this subject for some reason.

[Luke]

Closed-source carrier derivatives can never be trusted

I do expect, however, their carriers to ship modified, closed source derivatives.

Any closed-source derivative of Ubuntu (or just of Mir) shipped by a carrier on their device should automatically make the device untrusted, as I regard ALL smartphones to be right now. I would prefer that Ubuntu dump the carriers and simply write a known trustworthy OS that users can install on unlocked or rooted devices. Hell, I so distrust all the telecoms that I would insist not only on Linux but also on Coreboot installed myself on any device I was going to use both as a computer and as a modem on a cell carrier's network at the same time. Since the carriers might refuse to connect to such a device, that means a USB port and their USB access stick, or better yet their wireless hotspot and the device's wifi radio, are needed for connection. Nothing else can be trusted by the user and the carrier, as each considers the other malicious.

As for distros like LXDE-and older WMs like IceWM, they are meant for older x86 machines and x86 netobooks, both of which slow down badly when using compositing. I will go so far as to say that any machine that either predated Windows VIsta or was considered unable to run Vista when it was sold should be considered a good candidate for a non-compositing, X-only DE. After all, no pre-Vista computer sold with Windoze on it was designed for desktop compositing. Getting rid of compositing really helps both responsiveness and video playback on them.