Ubuntu 13.10 Will Not Ship Mir By Default 165
An anonymous reader writes "Ubuntu 13.10 is due for release later this month, and the Ubuntu developers were planning to replace the native X Server with Mir/XMir as Canonical's next-generation Ubuntu display server. However, they have now decided Mir will not be the Ubuntu 13.10 default on the desktop over the XMir X11 compatibility layer suffering multi-monitor issues and other problems. Canonical still says they will use Mir for Ubuntu Touch 13.10 images and remain committed to the Mir project."
Re:There's hope yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe they can stick with X and replace unity with XFCE.
XFCE don't fuck it up, all you have to do is stay yourself.
Re:There's hope yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Gentoo user here, just to side-step any Ubuntu fanboy responses.
Why are two competing display server stacks considered a problem in this case?
Over the years we've had countless situations like this
The various desktop environments, package management systems, initialisation systems, boot loaders, audio stacks, etc. etc.
Often seen as the benefit of open-source software.
The ability for multiple software components to exist that fulfil the same function. May the best man win.
Innovation and progress comes from each project trying to out-do it's rivals.
Often these competing solutions have a single distro or company behind them, driving development forward.
Why is Ubuntu's new display server, competing against X.org and Wayland any different?
Christ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can be sympathetic to the weirdness sometimes experienced in that area with classic X, given that it's a hoary design from the age when 'multi-monitor' meant "Computer that costs more than everybody in front of it" bodged and genetic-drifted into a totally alien environment; but this is the future, the one where you are hard pressed to buy a motherboard without at least two built-in video outputs, not infrequently more, you'd think that that would be a major consideration in any new graphics system design.
X is X (Score:4, Insightful)
Like Pulse audio it takes a long time to make a WM that does not have some serious issues somewhere. Ubuntu choosing to try to create a WM more suitable to the Unity gui is understandable. But it is no small task. This is the great part about the Linux kernel not a weakness as the nay sayers that peddle the poison crap that Linux distros are too fragmented. Unlike the alternative which is only united by the fact that with a Windows or Apple window manager you have NO CHOICE PERIOD.
Ubuntu is stable and very usable always with the window manager that they choose, so is Slackware, Knoppix, Mint etc etc etc. The detractors and shills do not realize the real significance of this. Which is the fact that different groups can do what they want as witness the Google WM on top of the kernel. Shills that harp that fragmentation there is a problem are starting to be exposed for what they are as witness the fact that Android is kicking but all over the planet.
Re:There's hope yet (Score:4, Insightful)
They should do that then.
Something will need to replace ubuntu soon as the easy to use grandma friendly linux desktop. They are hell bent on killing that distribution.
Re:There's hope yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Because fanboys.
Re:There's hope yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, I don't understand the comment.
Isn't Doing shit, "just because" a fundamental part of OSS software development?
Do you want to remove the "scratch your own itch" element?
Quick google says that Mir is GPL V3
What exactly is the issue here?
I'm missing something...
Re:There's hope yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everything newer is progress. Being able to only use one window at a time is not progress.
Re:There's hope yet (Score:5, Insightful)
It has a critical path which acts as a bottleneck
Bottleneck to what? High performance rendering has been in the X server for ages now. It gets a direct path to the GPU when such a thing exists.
and a bunch of crap that nobody uses any more.
My god the horror. That old line drawing code from the 80's. Sitting all alone, stable and debugged in some source file somewhere. And paged out on disk taking up no resources if it's really not being used.
And increasingly it has a bunch of extensions trying to work around the framework's deficiencies
It's amazing, really. In any other system updating the API to have new features is considered a good thing. The bias against X is so strong that even this is taken as a negative.
which reside in their own processes and increase the render and network latency.
WTF? The extensions are part of the X server and reside in the X server. If you're talking about the input latency to the compositor then you're full of crap. The IPC latency on a 10 year old Linux desktop is down in the microseconds. You won't notice the 4 extra IPC calls.
So whatever form Wayland takes the chances are it'll be a damned sight more maintainable than X11.
Maybe. But the thing is which I find mildly disturbing is that while X11 has many, many defincies, the Wayland folks seem to enjoy making up straw men and picking on things which are easily refutable.
As I pointed out here and in another post, the latency thing is one of the big lies they keep propagating. Yes it exists, but it is so small that it is negligable. So not a lie, more a half truth which is far more dangerous since it's as deceptive but harder to refute.
If Wayland is better, it should be better on its merits.
Re:There's hope yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Quick google says that Mir is GPL V3
What exactly is the issue here?
I'm missing something...
I think the main reason comes down to binary drivers. Neither Nvidia nor ATI have ever released enough specs for a fully capable (ie, respectable 3d support, hardware video decoding, etc) OSS driver to be written. If you actually want to use your video card to its potential you have to use binary drivers.
Having two competing display servers makes the environment more varied and makes the video card makers less likely to support either (whereas a single option would be more likely to be supported).
That said, the hardware companies seem to be fairly committed to Wayland over Mir, so I'm guessing that eventually thats what will eventually end up on top.
Re:There's hope yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe. But the thing is which I find mildly disturbing is that while X11 has many, many defincies, the Wayland folks seem to enjoy making up straw men and picking on things which are easily refutable.
You do realize that "the Wayland folks" and the X11 folks are the same folks, right? Perhaps you should give this a watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 [youtube.com]
Re:There's hope yet (Score:5, Insightful)
My god the horror. That old line drawing code from the 80's. Sitting all alone, stable and debugged in some source file somewhere. And paged out on disk taking up no resources if it's really not being used.
Yes the horror. It's junk which must be maintained and tested and impedes development of new functionality.
Maybe. But the thing is which I find mildly disturbing is that while X11 has many, many defincies, the Wayland folks seem to enjoy making up straw men and picking on things which are easily refutable.
They're not straw men and you didn't refute them so much as pretended that the brokenness didn't matter. Many of the people supporting Wayland are former X11 developers fed up with having to work around broken design. There are some good technical articles describing what is wrong with X11 such as this one [phoronix.com].
Re:There's hope yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Low on memory, totally configurable, really nice well integrated applications and an interface many people will understand right away.
As a bonus it has excellent support and future planning.
Re:There's hope yet (Score:2, Insightful)
And the GNOME project was utterly redundant given the existence of KDE....
Re:If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unity is an amazing product, it is visually beautiful, my Mac uber-fanboy flatmate was fascinated by it and it's perfectly obvious to a 'granny' that you click on the buttons to make stuff happen and they soon get the hang that you click on the top button to find stuff.
The real beauty of Unity though is how it works for power users with the keyboard. How many of you know about click/hold the super key? How many know about the HUD? Click on Alt in any app and see what happens. Unity at the start was a pure desktop solution, the touch stuff was added later because a lot of the ideas translated . Once you get used to it it is brilliant
I've pretty much always had a Linux box somewhere in my den but only yesterday I set up my new, main dev machine as pure Ubuntu 13.10 booting from UEFI off a SSD and running Mir
If it weren't for Canonical making Ubuntu such a polished distro I would probably be dual-booting Win7 or 8 and some-other-linux and mostly only ever booting to Windows.