Ubuntu's Roadmap Around Snappy, Phones & Mir / Unity 8

[blackout23]

If only Canonical stuck with their promised Wayland support back to 2010... It will hardly surprising the company face serious difficulties of making display manager, a much challenging software to work on.

Canonical seems to always either overestimate their abilities or underestimate what they're trying to do.

https://youtu.be/sLtcj7FdIYA?t=4m43s

Mark Shuttleworth about the Ubuntu Phone during CES 2013:
"We do expect devices to ship either in the last quarter of 2013 or the first quarter of 2014."

Yeah. Now it's the second quarter of 2015 and the Meizu MX4 didn't really get great reviews even from Linux friendly tech press. How on Earth did they think they'd have something half decent as early as Winter 2013?

[johnc]

This is good news to my ears. This means I'll be able to grab another LTS without Mir and Unity 8 before looking for another distro.

[Awesomeness]

Mir + Unity 8 delayed again is default DE and display server.
Who would have thought...

As always, hot fuss about reinventing the wheel, where the reinvention is broken on release and another 2 years stability releases are necessary.
After that they realize it's all not necessary to do it this way and here starts the reinvention cycle.

Welcome to Ubuntu's world.

The funny thing is that Ubuntu had a fully working Qt and QML-based Unity version years ago. That was Unity2D. Instead of simply porting Unity2D to Qt5 and adding a the phone UI to that port, they opted to do a complete rewrite.

[skierpage]

Instead of simply porting Unity2D to Qt5 and adding a the phone UI to that port, they opted to do a complete rewrite.

Yes, Canonical could have benefited from everyone's work on Wayland. Going your own way works better when you have massive resources. With the CLA they have ownership of intellectual property that's late and in which the rest of the Linux industry has no interest. Not a great decision.

[Siuoq]

The funny thing is that Ubuntu had a fully working Qt and QML-based Unity version years ago. That was Unity2D. Instead of simply porting Unity2D to Qt5 and adding a the phone UI to that port, they opted to do a complete rewrite.

I'll rather call it 'sad' instead of funny. Unity2D is, IMO, a really good DE.
I tried desktop next some weeks ago, I found it literally unusable, I can't see how could they make it well for the deadline. (I consider changing to Fedora as Michael have done it, despite I really loved ubuntu in 8.04-12.04 era, against XP and Seven)

[panda84]

To be fair, Mir is the default on shipping phones. It's just not the default on the desktop, because that would mean rewriting pretty much every application that uses X11 (which is pretty much all of them on a desktop). You could run X11 on top of Mir, but for what benefit other than possible instability and much higher maintenance cost?

To be fair, X11 on top of Mir in the desktop was actually their plan:

For 13.10 we plan on delivering Mir by default in Ubuntu Desktop with XMir (an implementation of X running on Mir)

http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/06/27/mir-plans-in-13-10/

Plans can change, but they always change their (questionable in my opinion) plans. This doesn't build trust around them and their announcements.

[jo-erlend]

If only Canonical stuck with their promised Wayland support back to 2010... It will hardly surprising the company face serious difficulties of making display manager, a much challenging software to work on.

As you know, Ubuntu was the first major distro to include Wayland and still does, which is why Ubuntu forms the basis for the official Wayland reference. People who think Ubuntu does not support Wayland, have been fooled by FUD or propaganda. It's kind of sad.

It is also interesting, looking at the thread in general, to see how many people seem to think Ubuntu should drop Unity 7 immediately and enforce Unity 8. If they had, then that would've been bad. For some people, everything is wrong if it's done by Ubuntu or Canonical, but it's correct if you do it anonymously. Trust me, I know.

[Awesomeness]

Ubuntu was the first major distro to include Wayland

Ubuntu just imported Wayland from Debian. Does Debian not count as major distribution?

[maszop]

As you know, Ubuntu was the first major distro to include Wayland and still does, which is why Ubuntu forms the basis for the official Wayland reference.

LOL
Ubuntu's changelog:

wayland (1.8.1-1) unstable; urgency=medium

* New upstream release

-- Hector Oron <[email protected]> Sat, 13 Jun 2015 02:00:30 +0200

wayland (1.7.0-2) unstable; urgency=medium

* Remove Cyril from Uploaders. Thanks for your past work!
* Upload to unstable.

-- Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <[email protected]> Wed, 27 May 2015 00:35:08 +0200

wayland (1.7.0-1) experimental; urgency=medium

[ Timo Aaltonen ]
* New upstream release.
* control: Add xmlto and graphviz to build-depends to build the
new documentation.
* libwayland-doc: Add a new package for documentation files.

[ Hector Oron ]
* Upload to experimental.

-- Hector Oron <[email protected]> Wed, 06 May 2015 12:35:23 +0200

http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/w/wayland/wayland_1.8.1-1/changelog