Jono Bacon Stepping Down From Canonical

[Cerberus]

People will criticise Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu no matter what they do. Remember when Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu was backing Wayland? Remember all the negative comments? People hated Wayland.

• "WTF what about network transparency?"
• "Oh God. Tell me that Ubuntu?s roadmap is not made by people who think they know the graphics stack because they read Phoronix"
• "One of the insanest move I?ve ever seen from Ubuntu? I am worrying about the compatibility and reliability of Wayland"
• Wayland.. will probably leave owners of El-Cheapo laptops (read: everything besides ?Dell Mini 9″) out in the rain",
• "how have all of you failed to notice that wayland is a dead project?"
• "I?m a bit baffled by this decision to move to Wayland."
• "if Wayland ever works (I doubt that for many reasons)..."
• "Do you want to stop Ubuntu being Linux?"
• "Losing the network transparency is likely going to loose you a lot of advanced users"
• "The move away from X concerns me greatly."
• "what are the actual advantages of going Wayland? It seems you?re going to throw out a lot of cool features in xorg.. and gaining? what exactly?"
• "Afraid this is the start of the end for *bunutu land? Your downstream distros are already looking for new bases? cough Mint cough? this will just push them over the edge."
• "X and XDMCP via SSH is critical as is support for real graphics systems"
• "let me say that this idea is yet another major bad one for Ubuntu"
• "I don?t understand the move away from the x-server...Fragmentation of the linux desktop. Need for new drivers, applications, compatibility modus for the x-server,?..Jesus"
• "what is the reason to stick with Linux?"
• "I?m really sad. Why are you doing this? Why don?t you just contribute to X and make it better?"
• "Wayland will mean that if anyone wants to play 3D-accelerated games with their computer, they?ll need an MS OS"

And that was just the immediate responses to a single blog post. And it went on and on. Blogs, forums, Slashdot, months and months of constant flaming of Shuttleworth and Ubuntu for backing Wayland. People were complaining that by backing Wayland, Ubuntu was trying to force Gnome and KDE to use Wayland... "Just because they're the most popular distribution doesn't mean that they can start changing everything around and have everyone else follow their lead."

I love this one: "Your downstream distros are already looking for new bases? cough Mint cough? this will just push them over the edge.". All of the downstream distros will leave because you chose Wayland. (Or Pulse Audio. Or systemd. Or upstart. There's always a reason the downstream distros are going to leave.)

And that other comment "Do you want to stop Ubuntu being Linux?" - that's right - Shuttleworth was flamed for "stopping Ubuntu being Linux" because he backed Wayland. Oh dear.

The Phoronix discussion, very first page, "What about the MASSIVE performance problems this will cause".

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Exactly, you nailed it perfectly, I also vividly remember the hate concerning Wayland in the beginning, but when Canonical announced Mir everyone suddenly liked Wayland, whatever Canonical does some people will hate them for it, it is the latest fashion among a portion of Linux users, if you dont hate Canonical and Ubuntu you are not cool, if you hate them you score more points in being a "true Linux/open source/FOSS fan", more so if you use Arch Linux which is the latest trendy bling in the Linux world. For a supposedly free spirited and friendly community, Linux community has a lot of flame wars, haters that hate for no reason other than feeling superior, and fanboyism that can sometimes reach astronomical levels, Mir just made that blatantly clear when those people came out in force on various forums, in a way Mir helped to reveal just how many hypocrites and haters are present in the Linux community.

[TheBlackCat]

Exactly, you nailed it perfectly, I also vividly remember the hate concerning Wayland in the beginning, but when Canonical announced Mir everyone suddenly liked Wayland

Things had changed a lot in those intervening three years. Wayland was nearing its first stable release, X11 devs had put their support behind it, and many major projects had declared their support for it and had begun porting to it.

This argument could hold some water if canonical had made the announcement to use Mir in 2010 when those sorts of attitudes were somewhat common, but by 2013 Wayland had become very popular and most communities had built their future plans around it. There are still people today who reject it, but to claim that people only started supporting Wayland after Mir was announced is totally counterfactual, and even the claim that people started supporting it more after Mir was announced has absolutely zero evidence behind it.

[Cerberus]

There are still people today who reject it, but to claim that people only started supporting Wayland after Mir was announced is totally counterfactual, and even the claim that people started supporting it more after Mir was announced has absolutely zero evidence behind it.

I love it when people flaunt around claims such as "zero evidence" like they have research data, statistics and comparisons at hand to back their claim with. Your "zero evidence" claim is your opinion only, unless you have the research and statistics to back it up, which you dont. I say that if one compares posts concerning Wayland right here on Phoronix, let alone other Linux portals and forums, before and after Mir was announced, one will see that support for Wayland grew significantly after Mir was announced. Not "real" evidence per se but has more substance than your "zero evidence" claim, my claim can be tested by comparing posts right here on Phoronix, anyone willing enough to dig out news articles and then reading comments can take a look and decide for themselves, best to be done by unbiased people who are neither in Ubuntu support camp nor in anti-Canonical camp.

[Luke_Wolf]

I love it when people flaunt around claims such as "zero evidence" like they have research data, statistics and comparisons at hand to back their claim with. Your "zero evidence" claim is your opinion only, unless you have the research and statistics to back it up, which you dont. I say that if one compares posts concerning Wayland right here on Phoronix, let alone other Linux portals and forums, before and after Mir was announced, one will see that support for Wayland grew significantly after Mir was announced. Not "real" evidence per se but has more substance than your "zero evidence" claim, my claim can be tested by comparing posts right here on Phoronix, anyone willing enough to dig out news articles and then reading comments can take a look and decide for themselves, best to be done by unbiased people who are neither in Ubuntu support camp nor in anti-Canonical camp.

It's honestly a victim attitude to think this change had anything to do with Canonical rather than just being the outcry of the individuals who don't like change, Wayland was getting the same outcry then as systemd has been over the past few years, and as PulseAudio did when it was new. Even the sheer level of hatred against Gnome Shell has quieted down as those who didn't like it shifted off to other desktops.

[brosis]

People will criticise Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu no matter what they do. Remember when Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu was backing Wayland? Remember all the negative comments? People hated Wayland.

• "WTF what about network transparency?"
• "Oh God. Tell me that Ubuntu?s roadmap is not made by people who think they know the graphics stack because they read Phoronix"
• "One of the insanest move I?ve ever seen from Ubuntu? I am worrying about the compatibility and reliability of Wayland"
• Wayland.. will probably leave owners of El-Cheapo laptops (read: everything besides ?Dell Mini 9″) out in the rain",
• "how have all of you failed to notice that wayland is a dead project?"
• "I?m a bit baffled by this decision to move to Wayland."
• "if Wayland ever works (I doubt that for many reasons)..."
• "Do you want to stop Ubuntu being Linux?"
• "Losing the network transparency is likely going to loose you a lot of advanced users"
• "The move away from X concerns me greatly."
• "what are the actual advantages of going Wayland? It seems you?re going to throw out a lot of cool features in xorg.. and gaining? what exactly?"
• "Afraid this is the start of the end for *bunutu land? Your downstream distros are already looking for new bases? cough Mint cough? this will just push them over the edge."
• "X and XDMCP via SSH is critical as is support for real graphics systems"
• "let me say that this idea is yet another major bad one for Ubuntu"
• "I don?t understand the move away from the x-server...Fragmentation of the linux desktop. Need for new drivers, applications, compatibility modus for the x-server,?..Jesus"
• "what is the reason to stick with Linux?"
• "I?m really sad. Why are you doing this? Why don?t you just contribute to X and make it better?"
• "Wayland will mean that if anyone wants to play 3D-accelerated games with their computer, they?ll need an MS OS"

And that was just the immediate responses to a single blog post. And it went on and on. Blogs, forums, Slashdot, months and months of constant flaming of Shuttleworth and Ubuntu for backing Wayland. People were complaining that by backing Wayland, Ubuntu was trying to force Gnome and KDE to use Wayland... "Just because they're the most popular distribution doesn't mean that they can start changing everything around and have everyone else follow their lead."

I love this one: "Your downstream distros are already looking for new bases? cough Mint cough? this will just push them over the edge.". All of the downstream distros will leave because you chose Wayland. (Or Pulse Audio. Or systemd. Or upstart. There's always a reason the downstream distros are going to leave.)

And that other comment "Do you want to stop Ubuntu being Linux?" - that's right - Shuttleworth was flamed for "stopping Ubuntu being Linux" because he backed Wayland. Oh dear.

The Phoronix discussion, very first page, "What about the MASSIVE performance problems this will cause".

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Was that irony? Did you read the comment that followed it?
There is a difference between taking a direction and not taking a direction. Its called no-bullshit reasoning.
When Ubuntu has annonced its move to Wayland, did the people object the move because of dislike of Wayland - how you put it, or did they object the move because Wayland was still alpha?

When Ubuntu tried to move to Wayland in an early time, was it an action against what community wanted? Community wanted stable software, not broken. They wouldn?t be against Wayland if it would be in current state, not of 2010. so that was clearly a move against community.

What should I mention next? Refusal to move from Upstart? Development of Unity requiring CLA that gives full rights to Canonical to make proprietary version out of anything (and they do make proprietary software)? Creating a fork of Wayland mid-air and acknowledging previous contributions to Wayland as an undercover learning job? And then posting an array of BS reasons why Mir is better? Or refusing to support community-made respins? Requiring payments from forks for package download?

Ubuntu name means "being human" and "working together". Even their name is against of what they were doing in recent time (2009 and later).

I call this - Bullshit Marketing. And Ubuntu is full of it.
Lay off more marketing crap and fund some real community projects instead.

[TheBlackCat]

Your "zero evidence" claim is your opinion only, unless you have the research and statistics to back it up, which you dont.

Huh? Do you even know what "zero evidence" means? It doesn't mean that the assertion is false, it means that nobody has presented any evidence to support the assertion. Your side is the side making the claim, it is up to you to provide the evidence to back it up. You haven't done that, therefore there is zero evidence backing up your assertion. It all comes down to Hitchen's razerL "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

I say that if one compares posts concerning Wayland right here on Phoronix, let alone other Linux portals and forums, before and after Mir was announced, one will see that support for Wayland grew significantly after Mir was announced.

And that is all your side has: baseless assertions. If you are going to make claims like this, then you need to actually do the comparison (and compare posts just before Mir was announced, not years before). Until you actually provide evidence to back up your claims, then your claims are merely baseless, evidence-free assertions which nobody has any reason to take remotely seriously.

[chrisb]

When Ubuntu has annonced its move to Wayland, did the people object the move because of dislike of Wayland - how you put it, or did they object the move because Wayland was still alpha?

No, people were clear that they thought Ubuntu switching to Wayland was stupid because:

• No network transparency in Wayland (the most cited reason)
• It is a big change in the graphics driver stack that has not been widely hardware tested, especially on old/cheap laptops
• No other distribution has switched to Wayland
• Applications need to be modified
• GUI libraries need to be modified
• No X compatibility without a compatibility layer
• No support from closed source proprietary graphics drivers
• It is pointless (they are happy with Xorg)

All of those reasons are still true (though the GUI libraries and applications are further along, and some people are no longer so happy with Xorg). Hardly anyone said "Wayland is fantastic but it is not ready yet" - the arguments were against change, not against the (unknown) stability of a future Wayland. Shuttleworth wasn't proposing to immediately ship an alpha version of Wayland back in 2010. His proposal was to continue using Xorg ("we’ll keep investing in the 2D experience on Ubuntu") and try to release prototypes of Ubuntu using Wayland in early 2012. He said, "and even then It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem". So even back in November 2010 he was saying that it would be 2015 and beyond before they could fully switch Ubuntu to Wayland. It wouldn't make sense for people to be objecting to the state of Wayland, when it was stated upfront that the full switch would not happen for years.

Anyway, I'm sure that when distributions do switch to Wayland, there will be an angry backlash from people who experience graphics bugs that they did not have under Xorg, people who need network transparency, people who lost accelerated graphics (and can't update their closed source drivers because their cards are old and no longer supported) etc. It is always going to be this way; there will always be some people who feel like they lose out with change, and so become angry at that change.

[chrisb]

What about the MASSIVE performance problems this will cause.

Was that irony?

No, I do not think it was. The full post was:

What about the MASSIVE performance problems this will cause. The opensource drivers are slow, and the proprietary ones don't work. Also, won't this compositing cause a massive drop in performance?

So it was clearly a reference to the common "Wayland is not supported by closed source proprietary drivers" complaint. He also posted about Nvidia:

I hope they don't support Wayland... Ever. Did anyone ever hear of "If it ain't broke, then don't fix it."? Seriously, X has worked for 24 years and it has never been displaced for a reason. It is extendable, reliable, and networking. I use X's network transparency every day. I don't see why people wouldn't want this feature. More than anything, X needs X12, not Wayland. A serious overhaul, while retaining backward compatibility, is by far the best solution, in my opinion. Wayland has many, many fundamental flaws. First and foremost, what about the many people that still use X's network transparency? Second, what about the people that *can't* use compositing because their graphics card doesn't support it, or their CPU is far too slow? Third, forcing compositing will greatly degrade 3D performance, as shown in numerous Phoronix benchmarks. Fourth, what about the users of BSD, Solaris, OS X, and Windows (with Xming)? I just wish people would remember why we still have X 24 years later... Oh, actually, the first place issue is the drivers... What about all the older drivers, and the proprietary drivers, should we just leave them out in the cold?

Was that irony? You are free to form your own judgement.

[grndzro]

People will criticise Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu no matter what they do. Remember when Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu was backing Wayland? Remember all the negative comments? People hated Wayland.

• "WTF what about network transparency?"
• "Oh God. Tell me that Ubuntu?s roadmap is not made by people who think they know the graphics stack because they read Phoronix"
• "One of the insanest move I?ve ever seen from Ubuntu? I am worrying about the compatibility and reliability of Wayland"
• Wayland.. will probably leave owners of El-Cheapo laptops (read: everything besides ?Dell Mini 9″) out in the rain",
• "how have all of you failed to notice that wayland is a dead project?"
• "I?m a bit baffled by this decision to move to Wayland."
• "if Wayland ever works (I doubt that for many reasons)..."
• "Do you want to stop Ubuntu being Linux?"
• "Losing the network transparency is likely going to loose you a lot of advanced users"
• "The move away from X concerns me greatly."
• "what are the actual advantages of going Wayland? It seems you?re going to throw out a lot of cool features in xorg.. and gaining? what exactly?"
• "Afraid this is the start of the end for *bunutu land? Your downstream distros are already looking for new bases? cough Mint cough? this will just push them over the edge."
• "X and XDMCP via SSH is critical as is support for real graphics systems"
• "let me say that this idea is yet another major bad one for Ubuntu"
• "I don?t understand the move away from the x-server...Fragmentation of the linux desktop. Need for new drivers, applications, compatibility modus for the x-server,?..Jesus"
• "what is the reason to stick with Linux?"
• "I?m really sad. Why are you doing this? Why don?t you just contribute to X and make it better?"
• "Wayland will mean that if anyone wants to play 3D-accelerated games with their computer, they?ll need an MS OS"

And that was just the immediate responses to a single blog post. And it went on and on. Blogs, forums, Slashdot, months and months of constant flaming of Shuttleworth and Ubuntu for backing Wayland. People were complaining that by backing Wayland, Ubuntu was trying to force Gnome and KDE to use Wayland... "Just because they're the most popular distribution doesn't mean that they can start changing everything around and have everyone else follow their lead."

I love this one: "Your downstream distros are already looking for new bases? cough Mint cough? this will just push them over the edge.". All of the downstream distros will leave because you chose Wayland. (Or Pulse Audio. Or systemd. Or upstart. There's always a reason the downstream distros are going to leave.)

And that other comment "Do you want to stop Ubuntu being Linux?" - that's right - Shuttleworth was flamed for "stopping Ubuntu being Linux" because he backed Wayland. Oh dear.

The Phoronix discussion, very first page, "What about the MASSIVE performance problems this will cause".

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

And yet Wayland is being adopted at an alarming rate.
Mir is being adopted by no one.

Early criticism is like ignoring all the progress made and stepping into a time machine just to win an argument......

[NothingMuchHereToSay]

And yet Wayland is being adopted at an alarming rate.
Mir is being adopted by no one.

Early criticism is like ignoring all the progress made and stepping into a time machine just to win an argument......

Mir is most likely going to be adopted by people who want to adopt Unity 8, as Mir is a dependency of it. I'm hoping it'll be easier to port over than the Compiz... stuff.. Idk, I just wish people understood why Ubuntu made these decisions, talk to people and stop being so closed minded dammit.