Considering Ubuntu is the most popular and widely supported desktop distro by companies and home users what will video companies such as Intel, AMD, and Nvidia do now that the next release of Ubuntu will use Mir rather than Xorg? Will the video drivers still be compatible? If not, do you think AMD will move to support Mir or stay developing with Xorg or even support both? Will Mir give improvements in gaming/video such as better FPS or 0 screen tearing? Will games such as from Steam even work on Mir? (And if not this is bad because Valve would have to re-develop their games for Mir because they support Ubuntu and then other distros who don't use Mir won't be supported or have to switch.

No replies, really? Has nobody heard of this yet?

Hi there,

yea, looks like. Me, for example, I wondered when I read your post: What the hell is "Mir"? The only thing I could think of was the former Russian (sorry, I think I should say Soviet here) space station Мир, which is usually transcripted "MIR" in Western script.

From what you write, I guess "Mir" is supposed to be a replacement for X.org - and then I ask myself: What for? What's wrong with X.org that it would need replacing?

Going further into the matter: No, I don't think the video drivers would have to be rewritten. A driver is usually (i.e. SHOULD be) agnostic of the application using it - like a network driver doesn't need to know whether it's being used by a browser, a softphone, an FTP client or a video streaming application.

[X] Doc CPU

Apparently there's a lot wrong with X - aren't some of the X.org team working on it's replacement at the moment?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waylan...e_architecture
I think Mir is a bit worrying as if Steam depends upon it in future it will mean that gaming for non-Canonical Linux could end before it's really begun which would be sad.
I may be wrong but I think that drivers will need to be changed to be compatible with Mir -- certainly NVIDIA drivers don't work with Weston/Wayland yet and the proof of concept distro I tried had to use the open source drivers.

Hi there,

this is weird: Mir, Wayland, Steam - neither of them means anything to me (apart from "steam" in everyday language). But I'm beginning to suspect that all this is focusing on the gaming-inclined users, and that would explain perfectly why I haven't heard of them before.

That depends on how "ideal", i.e. how abstract the existing drivers actually are. Ideally, a display driver exposes a low-level interface offering functions for setting a display mode, draw the simplest graphical elements like pixels, lines, rectangles, put precomputed bitmaps on the screen and maybe move display regions (optimizing scrolling and panning). All more sophisticared operations are not the driver's task, but the application's. Or maybe a hardware independent abstraction layer's like a window manager.

That's what it would be like in my world. But I admit, I'm very much a traditionalist. Usually, I'm happy with what's there and rarely feel the need for something more advanced.

[X] Doc CPU

Steam is only one aspect -- at present I don't game under Linux (well, I don't game full stop and my Machines only run Linux.). However, Steam coming to Linux makes it tempting to try some cheap and free games.
The NVIDIA drivers are more of a concern for me though I would hope NVIDIA won't drop X.org support if they decide to release Mir drivers.
Wayland/Weston is something everyone who uses a Linux desktop environment should make themselves aware of as it is looking like the replacement for X.org. Even Slackware users are discussing it on here and that's a distro not known for jumping on the "next big thing".
Mir you really ought to know about if you run Ubuntu since it may well be the display manager in the next LTS release. Probably, as you mention, drivers will work but from what I have read of Wayland and the NVIDIA blob I wouldn't take that for granted.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/building.html
Apparently Canonical are already trying to force their changes upon the wider community also -- so expect more in future:
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...To-Support-Mir

Intel- will do nothing, the drivers are (mostly) open source. AMD and nVidia, no idea, but I doubt they are going to do much work on Mir. Mir is written for unity, and even if ubuntu does have more users than any other single distro, the users of other distros would probably outnumber ubuntu users by a large number.

BTW, the 14.04 'compatibility layer for X', XMir, is based on XWayland.

Open source? Yes. Closed? No.

Maybe...but wayland could do the same thing and wayland isnt a closed project.

Who knows? I hope not. Ubuntu mir seems to be a cookie cutter version of Wayland, with all the problems of any canonical project. If anything that isnt X gets support, I hope its wayland, not mir.

I'm supirised you hadnt heard or wayland, its been around for ages.

It not gaming focused....just the one of the current things going around seems to be steam and linux, and whenever some new display protocol is discussed there is always a few 'this could really help gaming!' opinions posted round the net.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland...er_protocol%29

The next release of Ubuntu will not really ship with Mir. Ubuntu 13.10 will use XMir by default and fall back to Xorg if you use proprietary drivers. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will also use XMir, but without the Xorg fallback, that will be removed, since Mark Shuttleworth thinks that until then there will be proprietary drivers for Mir (though no official statement from AMD or Nvidia is known to me).
Intel will do nothing, they only have open source drivers and they are already working with Mir and Wayland. This will be different with AMD and Nvidia, while their open source drivers also already work (and nowadays the open source AMD driver is pretty good) I doubt that they will deliver a driver specifically for Mir. Nvidia and AMD have both stated that the Linux consumer market is not something they work on, they deliver they proprietary drivers for their workstation cards and that those drivers function with the consumer cards is a mere byproduct. Since most of their workstation cards will have a home in RHEL and SLED machines it is far more likely that we will get a Wayland driver first. Luckily both, Mir and Wayland, base their display servers on the EGL model (Wayland needs one extension to the standard), so that Mir should automatically work with Wayland drivers. If we get Mir drivers first it is not that hard for the Wayland people either, since Wayland is so modular that it is driver agnostic (with libhybris you can even use it on Android drivers).
Yes, it should give you better performance (Mir, not XMir), I am not sure about Mir's ability to be tear-free, but Wayland (which for now is the choice of any other distro besides Ubuntu, not even Kubuntu wil use Mir) is tear-free by design.
Most games aren't designed to run directly with Mir/X/Wayland, they use abstraction layers. For games usually the SDL framework is used, which already has support for X and Wayland. Actually, as it looks now, If Ubuntu wants Mir support for the larger frameworks (Qt, GTK, EFL, SDL, ...) they will have to do it themselves. Canonical going the Mir route, instead of using Wayland, as they stated before, is in the community mostly seen as a bad move and very few projects support them at all.
Their is nothing special in the relationship between Canonical and Valve, Valve recommends Ubuntu just because it is the most used distro. If Ubuntu will be incompatible with Steam in the future (which is not very likely, since emulation layers already exist) it is more likely that Valve will come up with their own distro, especially when it comes to the Steambox. IIRC, Valve have already stated that at this point they are no plans to migrate away from Xorg.Most of the Wayland developers are Xorg developers, yes.

Hi there,

if we're talking about this kind of Steam, it is totally clear to me that I haven't heard of it yet. Maybe I have, but then I quickly forgot about it again. On purpose.

Oh, shit. I still have Ubuntu listed in my profile. Thank you for the hint. Fixed.
Actually, I turned my back on Ubuntu when they turned their backs on Gnome2 as the primary desktop. I couldn't make friends with Gnome3, much less Unity. Instead, I found Mint, which is still pursuing the Gnome2 line, even though renamed.

Yes, so I'm reading now. But maybe I've been blocking it out because I didn't see its point (and still don't).

[X] Doc CPU

My understanding is:
X.org implements many things that are no longer used and implements other things in a less-than-efficient manner. Rather than changing X.org, possibly breaking dependencies and keep having to patch things which are not used for security and efficiency reasons the team decided to create a new display manager from scratch that will be more efficient and take better advantage of modern hardware.
Of course, how long it takes until Wayland is shipping with regular distributions meaning that you have to know about it is another matter.

The Xorg developers see its point. I recommend to watch this, a speak of Daniel Stone, a Wayland and Xorg developer: http://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44

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Ahh okay good thing Ubuntu 13.10 wont ship with Mir. How will the falThe statement quoted from Vlback work, it would be a session like a DE fallback? Eventually though they will ship with Mir and when they do I honestly think Ubuntu will fall, I don't think the hardware vendors are going to want to have to maintain drivers for each linux kernel with XOrg, XMir and then when XMir stops being used go and move to Mir. The statement "quoted" from Valve about how they will stay with Xorg is very re-assuring as if they moved to Mir other distros wouldnt be compatible. The question now here is this, companies have begun developing for Linux such as the Cryengine and Urneal engine, and also Football Manager 2014 which can be pre-ordered has linux support. Will these companies ever switch over to Mir when it used by Ubuntu or will they stay with XOrg, if they stay with Xorg then you can't run their games on Ubuntu but if they migrate to Mir then ONLY will it run on Ubuntu...unless other distros start migrating to Mir.

There are so many ways this can go both negative/positive, ubuntu can be the only one using it or could start the migration path and once we know it Xorg will no longer be used by distros and Mir will be used. Mir of course could offer better performance but then its the whole ubuntu vs other distros things. UGH!!! If anything why couldnt Ubuntu go with Wayland which actually has performance improvements, tests with Mir show that it performs a bit worse than Xorg.

As I see it X.org applications will still be supported by both Mir and Wayland so as long as things like Steam games and other third-party applications are written for X.org they'll be OK for a while at least.
Canonical can't use Wayland because they don't control its development and Ubuntu is a for-profit distribution that does exactly what Mark Shuttleworth says and no more or less. It's not even "Linux" and more -- just check the website.
Other distributions can't use Mir as it's Canonical-only and subject to whatever rules of use they deem fit on a given day. That's even assuming that those with experience of X.org over the years even wanted to use a framework developed overnight by newbies rather than one they've been working on for a while.

The login manager can start X and Mir/XMir, so it just has to check which drivers are used to choose the right one to start.
Most of these companies use SDL for abstraction anyways, since it makes porting quite easy. Once Canonical has added Mir support to SDL (officially or with their own patched version) any software using SDL should also run on Mir. If they program directly for X you will be able to run that software using XMir (or XWayland, if your distribution runs Wayland).
This is not really a thing distributions can do. Currently the only desktop environment supported by Mir is Ubuntu's Unity, no other DE has plans for a Mir port, while the big ones (Gnome and KDE) are already porting to Wayland. Any distro that uses other DEs as Unity (so basically any other distro than Ubuntu, even Kubuntu) can't switch to Mir and many have already stated that they will support Wayland.
Very good question and there is no reasonable answer from a technical point of view. Mir can do nothing that Wayland can't (indeed it is the other way around, XMir is a fork of XWayland and the ability to run on Android drivers was also invented first for Wayland and Canonical forked it). There were some alleged technical reasons on their Wiki when Mir was announced, but they were debunked literally in hours and had to be removed. From what it looks like now the invention of Mir was a purely political thing, having to do with Canonical now being the only one able to provide a closed source version of Mir (due to their Contributor License Agreement), which gives them an advantage to other companies. Since Wayland is MIT licensed any company can make a closed version, so Canonical would not have that advantage if they would use Wayland.

If Ubuntu goes for Mir and everyone else for Wayland, it will just mean that Ubuntu will no longer be Linux: just another Unix variant, like OSX. Who cares?

On reflection, that would be great! I don't Linux associated with spyware and tax evasion.