Yet another display server - Mir
 

From canonical Mir yet another display driver, here.
Thoughts?

In general: If it's better than what we currently have, we benefit. If it's worse, it'll fall away.

I would love to hear patricks thoughts on this!

They can't even let Wayland get its foot in the door before replacing it. Watching the open source/Linux community can be fun sometimes.

HAL to augment udev!
udisks to replace HAL/augment udev!
udisks2 to replace udisks/augment udev!

Upstart to replace SysV!
systemd to replace SysV/supplant Upstart!

Wayland to replace X!
Mir to replace X/supplant Wayland!

All these technologies, just passing through...like tumbleweeds in a Linux desert.

(In other words, this will probably crash and burn and waste everyone's time...so I don't think I'll bother following its development.)

It's a shame that one of the major players in the Linux world, with money to throw around, insists on doing stuff like this.. Why not just throw money and effort at Wayland, rather than duplicating effort to develop their own in-house version?

It's all about control. Canonical don't have complete control over decisions in Wayland land. This is just more NIH control-freakery like the Gnome v Unity thing - though in that case Gnome were doing some pretty stupid things so it was easier for them to justify it. In the case of Wayland, I don't think they can make a valid technical argument for going their own way.

With any luck, everyone else will ignore mir and it'll end up as a Ubuntu only irrelevance.


P.S. They've already revised their "Why not use Wayland?" section once after their fud claiming that Wayland was insecure was quickly disproven.

This is Deja vu, and I don't mean the font.

I think Canonical should just do it. No need to justify it beyond that it is theirs. No one from Google needed to justify Android's display server, so why should they? I don't have to use Ubuntu. They could succeed in being a standard if they do it right, so I'm not going to give an opinion when they are just starting out.

Now that said, I actually like Canonical better than Red Hat. At least Canonical rests on whether they made the right decision solely, and Red Hat has their people building fiefdoms and trying to force their 'solution' on everyone because they've already made the right decision.

I think Wayland can be a viable display server for Slackware, in a number of years from now. I don't think I'd be in a hurry--and no need to be, since we already have X. And that's the most favorable response for a major component replacement I have. There are components that I'd never want to come into Slackware listed earlier. I don't understand why there is a need to keep rewriting userspace anymore.

Based on the Arstechnica writeup, it sounds like Mir will be quite tightly coupled to Unity and thus pretty much irrelevant to us.

Unity is moving to QT so it will share technologies with KDE so if mir works better for Unity it should also works good for KDE. Keep in mind Xorg is really old and a replacement is overdue to adopt new technologies.
If it mir works I bet other distros will start using it so it is relevant to the rest.

My thoughts exactly - +1 to that!

Yes. Canonical should change its name to something like "Sisyphus Technologies - Leading the way in effort duplication since 2004" :rolleyes:

I (and I am not alone with that) doubt that Canonical even has the ability to create a working display server, less so in the tight timeframe they have given themselves for that.
And that they do it because Wayland lacks support for something they need is nothing but blatant lies, they never have contributed anything to Wayland or even discussed their issues with the Wayland developers. This really is about control, nothing more.

Years ago nobody envied a supermarket cashier using a touch
screen. Some Big Monkey told us "Desktop machines are obsolete,
tablets are the future" and everybody jumped to "embrace the
future".

In my country we use to say "La culpa no es del chancho sino del
que le da de comer" that literally says "Don't blame the pig but
who feeds it". One example is what happened in systemd thread,
those complaining about systemd and about my hard wrapped text
(obviously mobile phone users) at the same time :).

Choose a name for today's religion "out of the box", "use and
drop", "the easy way", "just do it". Or should we call it
"planned obsolescence"?:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/03...-every-90-days

.

Strong point of view, here

Add another to the list of projects that have wanted to but failed to replace X11. Why they wanted to replace it is not known to me, but maybe they weren't clear on that either.

They need a display server that allows integration with their mobile version of their OS, as the develop of their Ubuntu for phone and tablet is moving fast they will also make it work in the desktop version.
X11 and Waylan arent capable to do that and they have no control over the development of Waylan for what I understand.
I really wish them good luck.

Wayland was demonstrated running on top of Android last year already, so Wayland is able to achieve what Canonical wants.

And there you have found the real reason.

You have to deal with the fact, that the Linux ecosystem is now big enough to no longer be a collaborative effort. Now it's a competitive one. Companies will reinvent their own wheels and repeat the Unix wars of the 1980s. This is nothing new.

It seems that Canonical more or less stands alone with Mir now. After the call from the Kwin maintainer that he won't accept distribution specific patches in Kwin (read: unless more distributions than just Ubuntu are using it there will be no official Mir support for KDE) now the Gnome developers want to speed up there Wayland support. They want to have partial Wayland support in Gnome 3.10 and complete Wayland support in Gnome 3.12, so that we can see in spring 2014 a Gnome that is fully running on top of Wayland.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTMyNjQ