UBports Has A Lot Of Work This Summer For Letting Ubuntu Touch Live On

[profoundWHALE]

Of course, "begin using Unity 8 right away" has been here for years and I still have useful machines in my lab that run only Unity 8 as bought from their commercial manufacturers as proof so that's a little disingenuous, but I take your point.

I say that because UBports is focused on phones. The quicker that they can have Mir compatible with the Wayland protocol so it can function as either a Wayland server or as a client, the quicker that things will happen with it, particularly on mobile.

It's also likely going to be faster to make Mir work with Wayland than make Unity 8 use another compositor or write their own.

If they can get it done and say to everyone, "Look, we did it!" then Unity 8/Ubuntu on phones won't be considered dead/dying.

[profoundWHALE]

What they actually do is running Mir on top of Wayland: https://github.com/ubports/mir/commi...93a3503aa69150

I thought that because of the wording in the Phoronix article that they were trying to rewrite Unity 8 so that they can ditch Mir completely.

[bregma]

I say that because UBports is focused on phones. The quicker that they can have Mir compatible with the Wayland protocol so it can function as either a Wayland server or as a client, the quicker that things will happen with it, particularly on mobile.

That's a very misplaced understanding of how things work.

It's a good idea to make Mir support the Wayland protocol so that Wayland clients could run natively on Unity 8. That would let applications written exclusively for Wayland run on those phones. Adding additional protocol support to a server should be relatively trivial.

It's a mistake to port Mir to run as a client of Mutter or KWin or Weston, since (a) you'd need to write an entire server platform, (2) you'd end up with several levels of indirection for each pixel to travel and (3) you'd need to port those compositors to those mobile platforms. I would hazard a guess that it would take several decades for a weekend hobby project to do that. Then, you'd need to start on writing your own system compositor because you dropped the existing Mir one.

It's also likely going to be faster to make Mir work with Wayland than make Unity 8 use another compositor or write their own.

Certainly. If you mean make the Mir server support the Wayland protocol to speak to clients as I said. That's the complete opposite of making Mir a Wayland client, as UBports is starting to do.

If they can get it done and say to everyone, "Look, we did it!" then Unity 8/Ubuntu on phones won't be considered dead/dying.

Look. Mir has been running on phones for years. It is not and has never been the problem with getting Unity or Ubuntu on phones. Doing a lot of work to remove it and replace it with something else is not going to make any kind of positive difference, since it has never been on critical path to delivery. I'm not saying it can't or shouldn't be done, I'm saying adding a big and hazardous development effort to the critical path to delivery is not going improve the situation.

[profoundWHALE]

It's a mistake to port Mir to run as a client of Mutter or KWin or Weston

Just in case you thought that's what I meant, well, I didn't say that at all. I said to function like how Mutter or KWin work in regards to Wayland, as in, make Mir compatible with Wayland and then progress on Unity 8 can go forward much more quickly because there will be more interest. I was speaking about quicker development due to interest.