Ubuntu's Mir Gets Delayed Again 241
jones_supa writes "Delays keep piling up for the Mir display server on the Ubuntu desktop. After already being postponed multiple times, Mir might not be enabled by default on the Ubuntu Linux desktop until the 16.04 LTS release — in two years time! This was the estimate by Mark Shuttleworth in a virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit. Using Mir, Mark says, will lead to supporting more hardware, obtaining better performance, and 'do some great things' with the technology. He expects some users will start using Mir on the desktop over the next year. Mir is already packaged as an experimental option, along with an experimental Unity 8 desktop session."
This could be good news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This could be good news... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think we need both to compete. Some of the early limitations proposed in Wayland were frankly, utter shit, and it was only pressure to lift their game that led to them being dropped.
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Why? Given they both solve the same problem, but one has wide support and has shipped on devices, what use is the other?
Mir did not appear until way, way late in Wayland's game, and it appeared with a lot of terribly uninformed commentary from Canonical regarding how Wayland worked.
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If this is true then why even have Wayland? It solves pretty much the same problems that X had already solved. We could have simply modified X.
If Wayland is justified then so is Mir.
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We could have simply modified X.
From what I've heard, there is nothing whatsoever "simple" about modifying X. Something about only 4 or so people on the planet understanding how the mangled internals work...
Re:This could be good news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Your response is a combination of reductio ad absurdum:
and ad hominem:
It's very weak and emotional filled response. It makes me think you more of a Wayland fanboi who can't handle the competition than someone who has anything important to add to the conversation.
While I do think it's detracts from the efforts being made by Wayland, I don't see anything wrong with Mir's existence. We always said competition is good. We said this when Linux went against Windows, to justify the multiple desktops available (e.g. Gnome, Qt, XFCE, OpenStep, etc.) and I can see the same argument said for Mir versus Wayland.
Wayland is competing against X windows. They are offering the promise of improved performance and maintainability by jettisoning the legacy code of X. I don't see Mir any differently. I see what the AC is going for and agree. Wayland may have some of the same programmers of X, but that doesn't necessarily mean X is abandonware.
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Why? Given they both solve the same problem, but one has wide support and has shipped on devices, what use is the other?
"KDE solves the same problem as GNOME, what use is GNOME?"
"Firefox solves the same problem as Chrome, what use is Chrome?"
"iOS solves the same problems of a phone OS as Android, what use is Android?"
We can go on like crazy with this concept. Competition spurs people to do better, even if ultimately one wins out over the other. The challenge is never to let anyone stay dominant for too long, lest people get lazy. Each of my examples above I think was in a bit of a rut until the competitors came along, and no
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No, it is obvious if you follow development mailing lists that the announcement of Mir was a big kick in the pants for the Wayland developers and they started actually working on the real thing. So I think Mir did a good thing.
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Why?
I think we need both to compete. Some of the early limitations proposed in Wayland were frankly, utter shit, and it was only pressure to lift their game that led to them being dropped.
People seem happy that the upstart/systemd decision has been made. I imagine they will be happy when the Wayland/Mir decision is, too. We don't need both to compete, we already have X for that.
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Or just use X. Big deal.
Practically speaking, yes, X would probably be a perfectly workable fallback, but it's still a problem if X's 'replacements' don't have good portability.
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It may be that Wayland / Weston targets Linux in the first instance (just as Linux kernel originally targeted x86 processors) but that does not preclude it from other kernels over time. If s
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Network transparency was conspicuous by its absence for a long time.
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Consider the breakup of the Internet Explorer team when it was considered to be "good enough" as an example. By current standards IE way back then was of extremely low quality but there was not seen to be any viable competition.
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And Ubuntu started Mir because their engineers seem to believe Mir has fundamental performance advantages over Wayland in resource-constrained environments like phones. It's possible they're completely wrong, but if they're right then we need Mir for Linux
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That was one of the claims that Canonical made with no supporting evidence whatsoever. Ironically, Canonical made that claim, but Jolla shipped Wayland on their handset first - and the library that makes it possible to use Android drivers was developed by one of their engineers for use with Wayland.
Mir may be useful, but Canonical marred its release badly.
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Agreed. Wayland development appeared to accelerate after Ubuntu announced Mir. If the only thing that ever happens because of Mir is that it made the rest of the Linux community unite behind Wayland and speed its adoption, that's still a good thing.
From what I've heard about the commit statistics, there was no real change in Wayland development itself. Where we're seeing the acceleration is the desktop environments realizing they really needed to start their porting work. THIS is definitely a good thing.
And Ubuntu started Mir because their engineers seem to believe Mir has fundamental performance advantages over Wayland in resource-constrained environments like phones. It's possible they're completely wrong, but if they're right then we need Mir for Linux on smart phones.
There seems to be this myth that Wayland doesn't work with Android GPU drivers. Mir's support for Android drivers uses libhybris to achieve this, which is atually Wayland library for allowing Wayland to work with Android GPU drivers.
And we're start
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More precisely, I wish the transition will not fragment the system between a lot of still potentially useful apps that cease working and the new stuff that will take years to mature to the point of old apps. Think about the transition between kde 3 and 4, or end up like people running classic unix apps under OSX.
Network transparency is a MUST to me, but if it is important for many it should end up getting implemented into any solution eventually.
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Network transparency is a MUST to me, but if it is important for many it should end up getting implemented into any solution eventually.
I am curious as to why?
I have seen the amazingly cool things X can do when someone showed them to me a decade or so back, but it has never once been useful to me in the real world.
When I admin a linux server I do everything on the command line via ssh. This is the whole strength of Linux in that you can do everything without needing a GUI. What I have needed far more is the responsiveness that direct display writes from app to hardware give me when running stuff locally.
I never seem to have a need to run a
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I never seem to have a need to run a GUI on a remote machine but I use them on my local machine every day
Plenty of people have the need to use a remote GUI, that's why Microsoft made remote desktop. Usually though, you just need one or two applications, and it's more convenient to have them show up by themselves instead of needing to deal with the entire screen of the other computer.
Of course, if all you ever do is admin on the command line, you're not going to need that. You probably don't even need a GUI at all on those servers.
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Conversely Microsoft's RDP implementation is pretty much a top of its game remote desktop system.
Look the reality here is VNC sucked because we don't have fast compression libraries to use with it. That's changed - a lot. We're in an age where mobile devices have H.264 ASICs, and TigerVNC/TurboVNC exist.
What we're desperately lacking is a desktop UI which lets us seamlessly bring those components together - I want to be able to teleport my app windows across to other desktops and bring them back locally, or
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Have you tried using Xpra [xpra.org]?. It does exactly that with X. It works great over the internet, and lets you attach and detach X applications across X servers. Basically, it's screen for X.
Re:This could be good news... (Score:4, Informative)
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Linux has always featured choice. Personally I dislike KDE and I am critical of it but I'm not required to use it so I don't. Nor are you required to use Wayland. Stick with X for as long as you like. Gather a core of likeminded people and produce a dist that suits your requirements. I'm sure Amish Linux will be a huge hit.
And every software is "unstable untried" until it is. I'm quite certain Wayland will have bugs in it and will fail to function in certain configurat
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And those bugs will be fixed, either in Wayland itself or in the code it depends on
I'm not convinced that's true.
And just "some X11 developers"? The most prominent supporters of Wayland are major X11 developers who know how broken X is.
Yes, that is the problem. x.org developers aren't known for their project-management skills, and doing a big rewrite of something that basically works is a rookie project-management mistake.
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No commercial implementation of Unix uses X (NextStep, OSX, Android) and even Sun back in the day tried its own alternative (SunNews).
Commercial implementations of Unix suck as a rule, HPUX, AUX, AIX..........so you saying, "X isn't as good because some company chose Y" isn't a valid argument.
Give me BSD or Linux over any of those.
Re:This could be good news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Commercial implementations of Unix suck as a rule,
Wrong. OSX doesn't suck, Solaris didn't suck in its time, Android doesn't suck and even your much beloved Linux didn't get to be a real serious operating system until IBM decided to adopt it and spent massive amounts of money bringing it up to enterprise quality.
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In it's time? Solaris is still available and WIDELY USED in industrial and scientific worlds.
Where are you getting your Unix information because it seems to be pretty messed up.
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Of course it's still widely used. Windows 2000 is still widely used, too. That doesn't mean both are not past their prime.
Certainly people use Illumos, too, but since Oracle acquired Sun and all but killed Solaris by making it closed source (or limited access source) and eliminating support for OpenSolaris, there is virtually no redeeming quality to the OS over any other flavor of Unix or Linux (ZFS is all that occurs to me) particularly when Oracle Linux exists. Oracle has a horribly infamous reputation
wrong (Score:2)
And on topic, so this new server is buggier than the current xerver? How can that be, the current version has to be one of the buggiest pieces of distributed code I have ever seen.
People moved in hordes to RDP as a protocol because X sucks so bad on a LAN. But the desktop will not run on RDP, unless you switch to XFCE. Is it just me, or does XFCE look like something from the 50s?
With all the talk
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> People moved in hordes to RDP as a protocol because X sucks so bad on a LAN
That doesn't add up - VNC has been around since forever so people would have moved to that for the same reasons that they might move to RDP. (RDP is a bit better than VNC but that's not really relevant).
My experience of X on a lan is quite good - I use remote gvim all the time. X over the internet isn't so good. I have occasionally ran remote gvim sessions over the internet in the past but forgoing a GUI and running vim over SSH
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"Yeah, really, why limit it to commercial version of Unix that suck. I haven't seen any that doesn't suck."
You haven't seen many then. Almost all the commercial unix's still around (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris) IMO are better for heavy iron back end use when compared to Linux. No one gives a shit if they don't support the latest flavour-of-the-month graphics doodles on the desktop , thats not what they're designed for. If you want fancy graphics by a Mac, but don't expect to run a bank on it.
"because X sucks so bad
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I agree. We use AIX at work. No X or GUI of any kind, but the systems are rock-solid and essentially never need to be rebooted - even for fairly serious filesystem changes. My only complaint about AIX vs Linux for our server-based apps is that it's harder to find pre-built binaries when I want to incorporate a new open source library into our system. Sometimes it's hard even to get the code to build with the standard 'configure - make' process (though I've always been able to get it to work eventually).
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Scalability (CPUs and petabyte storage ability), reliability, proper containers, kernel tuned to the specific hardware, better system management apps
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It is not so much that commercial unixes sucked, more that they were encumbered with so many restrictions and limitations that it got plain annoying and hard to use them. From missing tools and compilers to forced kernel rebuilds for the most trivial configuration change, anything to extract just one more license fee from the user. This, combined with the unix wars where players tried to outdo their competitors by doing things their own way made life much harder than needed.
This is probably one of the bigge
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From missing tools and compilers to forced kernel rebuilds for the most trivial configuration change,
You do realize that this describes Linux circa 1996 much better than Solaris in 1996, which always shipped with a full suite of compilers and developer tools, right? Back then you couldn't load a new driver into Linux without recompiling the kernel.
That was in fact one of the key selling points of Sun hardware: you get the software for free.
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Erm, by 1996 we had Linux 1.2, which had loadable kernel modules and a full development toolchain, and Solaris 2, which included "no C compiler, not even a crippled one" *
This was typical of Unix distributions of the era. Development tools for pretty much all the major Unix flavors cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. User space tools tended to be relatively primitive compared to their GNU equivilents (e.g. tar often supported only the old v7 or ustar variants which imposed path and file type limit
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Why should we emulate any of those just because they're commercialized?
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... and X.org is commercialized how?
The one thing they have in common is that they all looked deep into the bowels of the beast and they all rejected. The commercialization thing is a red herring and you know it.
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But a few X fanbois think they know better 'cuz hmm erh.... network transparency!
One way or the other, networked Wayland will get figured out - I don't need X primitives across the wire, I just need to run an app. This can be figured achieved.
I'm more concerned that security is an afterthought in Wayland, and it'll get bolted on at some point. X's security is enough to make an auditor's skin crawl and Wayland isn't (yet) any better.
Maybe Wayland will forever be a development idea and somebody will fork it
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Which is of course why X gets used where it is used in the first place. Wrap your head around X being used on MS Windows guys - once you work out why it is used there you'll stop laughing at network transparency and see why people are using it.
Re:This could be good news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that most people don't use X network transparency. You can achieve the same effect without it, and this is what most people do, but they don't even know it. They see a remote client and immediately think "it must be network transparency!" If that were the case then surely windows is network transparent since it supports remote desktop.
As I said, network transparency is the mating call of the X noob.
Yes, it is a flamebait-ish statement, but it also happens to be the truth.
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Absolutely. I've been using a car for twenty years that doesn't make me an expert mechanic. It's funny that simply because you open a windows manager or write a few function calls for X you consider yourself an expert. on it.
The people who do know the X innards inside and out, namely X.org, says it sucks and are writing Wayland.i
Why so much FUD about X? (Score:2)
How did you manage to not notice anything as major as that when you were become enough of an expert to shout us all down?
What motivates such fanboys to be so aggressive about a topic that they know
Re:Try harder (Score:5, Insightful)
You are really calling the people who have been using X for years "noobs"?
Using X does not mean understanding X. Additionally using X does not mean understanding how things have changed under the hood when there's been no visible change in the usability of the system.
Frankly a lot of X veterans who maybe once used X in a truly network transparent way think that just because their ability to send a window to another X system means it's still network transparent, which is utter rubbish. There's no modern distro which actually implements remote X in any other way than Wayland is proposing to do it, pixels scraping and sending it over the network.
Yet for some reason some people are still hung up on a feature which they think they use because frankly they don't understand anything, and the most vocal bunch seems to be the ones with the longest beards.
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Presumably if you're arguing on slashdot its because you've got quite a long beard yourself.
Who modded this crap up? (Score:2)
"There's no modern distro which actually implements remote X in any other way than Wayland is proposing to do it, pixels scraping and sending it over the network."
Utter utter utter crap. If you open a standard X app - eg xterm - on a remote server it will use the standard X protocol, it will NOT do remote desktop style pixel scraping. If you don't believe me check it out with tcpdump.
"Yet for some reason some people are still hung up on a feature which they think they use because frankly they don't understa
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There's no modern distro which actually implements remote X in any other way than Wayland is proposing to do it, pixels scraping and sending it over the network.
Utter utter utter crap. If you open a standard X app - eg xterm - on a remote server it will use the standard X protocol, it will NOT do remote desktop style pixel scraping. If you don't believe me check it out with tcpdump.
You're of course technically correct, as long as you run a plain X application. Which is xterm and.... what? Nothing that uses KDE, Gnome, wxWidgets or any other form of toolkit from the last 15 years at least. If you talk about remoting anything that actually looks like a GUI there's a 99.99% chance it won't be network transparent, but if you cover your ears and chant "xterm" real loud you can ignore that. And if xterm is all you need you might as well use plain SSH, it's basically SSH with a server drawn
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https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap... [apple.com]
There is an x server for the ipad...
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How I wish I hadn't already commented on this article...
Re:This could be good news... (Score:5, Informative)
Which is of course why X gets used where it is used in the first place. Wrap your head around X being used on MS Windows guys - once you work out why it is used there you'll stop laughing at network transparency and see why people are using it.
X is only network transparent if all your apps are from 1995 and are written against Motif. Everything newer than that is not network transparent, it's just shoving uncompressed bitmaps across the network in a highly inefficient wrapper protocol that makes large numbers of inefficient, lag inducing round-trips.
A rootless VNC-esque protocol (Xpra) is a superior solution in every way.
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This is why I use NX. It solved that problem for me and I've been using X over a crappy VPN for years without the pain of plain X.
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X is only network transparent if all your apps are from 1995 and are written against Motif.
You're a fucking idiot. I was playing an OpenGL game over X from across the network. It was rendering beautifully and responsive... except the audio was coming from the other room where all the game code was running.
Re:This could be good news... (Score:5, Informative)
If you think that he's wrong maybe you should look at how any modern X system works. Both X developers and Wayland developers have discussed in detail that there is nothing network transparent about any modern release of X which does any kind of direct rendering or hardware acceleration, something that was introduced around the mid 90s, so the parent's comment is actually right on the mark.
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X developers and Wayland developers
/agree
Synonymous terms. X devs are the ones making Wayland. I find it funny and kind of sad that so many people think X is somehow better when it's made by the same people. If those people don't like Wayland, they are free to fork X and maintain it themselves. From what I hear, it is an absolute mess because if has so many conflicting features.
tablet and phone (Score:2, Informative)
It's already default on the tablet and phone, which is what Shuttleworth is excited about these days. So in that sense, it is already here.
So wayland is going to have to do a lot more than make decent ground if Ubuntu is to drop Mir. Wayland will need to do everything that Mir and X11 can do, and exceed them, and also be on a mature and well tested code base. Merely being an adequate competitor won't cut it.
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Do you mean that Mir is already on a phone? Or Wayland?
I already have Wayland in my Jolla phone running Sailfish OS, so Wayland is just as ready in the mobile world. That is a working device that I bought.
Re:This could be good news... (Score:4, Insightful)
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But remember Wayland was floundering until just after Mir was announced. Only once all the righteous indignation kicked in did it start going anywhere. Without Shuttleworth we'd all be stuck in the 70's.
I was going to say the same thing. without competition Wayland would have moved very slowly, if at all.
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Competition is always healthy, which is why Windows sucked so badly for so long.
Also, I can't help every time I see the name "Mir" - didn't that crash and burn years ago after an intentional de-orbit?
Re:This could be good news... (Score:5, Insightful)
I liked ubuntu early on, because when it was X11 and Gnome 2, they made using linux easy, with using the exact same technologies everyone else running a linux desktop was using. They were using the most mainstream widely supported technologies.
And thats all I want out of a newbie distro. To take wideley supported, most default software, package it together, with support, make the best sane configs. Find the best GUI config tools, and make a coherent OS family like windows and mac do, for everyone who is non-technical, so they can enjoy what we do, and I have something to recommend to non-techies.
It would also make my life easier, being I'm the one who generally fixes the computer.
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And thats all I want out of a newbie distro. To take wideley supported, most default software, package it together, with support, make the best sane configs. Find the best GUI config tools, and make a coherent OS family like windows and mac do, for everyone who is non-technical, so they can enjoy what we do, and I have something to recommend to non-techies.
Welcome to Mint!
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Mint + MATE = heaven
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I don't see Mir as being in much competition though. Canonical have hobbled interest in it due to the restrictive licence and contributors agreement and most people regard it as divisive. I will be interested to see what the gubuntu dist do when GNOME shell is fully Wayland compatible - whether they intend to use it or if they will be con
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Re:This could be good news... (Score:4, Informative)
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Desktop_effects... those are highly important to getting work done.
This is the problem nothing is being done for real performance... it's all for glitter and oooh shiny.
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Much better performance
Any actual real world data (read: benchmarks that show a practically useful improvement) to back that up ? Also, Wayland removes support for 2D acceleration, and existing X applications would have to use an emulation layer, that is, running an instance of X on top of Wayland.
I do not have. I base that only on what I have heard.
no tearing problems
Can be fixed without replacing X, and is a minor issue anyway.
Not a minor issue at all. Of default Linux installations, only Compiz-based ones can reliably prevent tearing. Mutter tears slightly, but it can be fixed with some configuration. XFCE tears because the default compositor uses XRender (the default compositor can be replaced with Compton to fix the issue). KDE tears by default on some systems unless "full screen repaints" is selected. LXDE does not ship with a compositor and all so it tears greatly. So tear
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Can be fixed without replacing X, and is a minor issue anyway.
You lie or are ignorant. Several of the lead devs of X have stated that tearing in X cannot be fixed without completely breaking the protocol. They've been trying to fix this issue since '95. Your basic understanding of this simple concept makes everything you say questionable.
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PhD thesis or display server? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've found (as a rule of thumb) that, when asking a grad student "How much time do you think you have left before you can write up your thesis?", if the answer is two or more years out then it really means "I don't know." The student honestly believes this answer, but in reality he/she doesn't know how much he/she doesn't know.
I'm starting to feel about the same with Mir and Canonical here. Shuttleworth is the tenured but aloof professor who casually coaxes his students (employees) toward completing milestones but without too much urgency. Money's not plentiful, but the professor has enough contacts and contracts to keep his lab going and give a stipend to his students. They put out a few papers (releases) each year, and each time the students think this grand project is "almost done"... only to discover that there's still more left to do.
There's tremendous value in this kind of exploratory research. I'm just not sure it makes sense to package it up for end users.
If I were Mark Shuttleworth's technical advisor, I'd suggest examining RedHat's Fedora model. Create a small group called Canonical Labs where stuff like Mir and Unity can flourish, with continuous releases and without the artificial constraint of a set release date. (If this makes the environment too lackadaisical and development isn't progressing fast enough, find some other way to instill discipline and/or motivation; don't make it the threat of moving alpha code to end-users.) When it's stabilized (no longer shuffling menus and window icons around, for example), then integrate it with the main Ubuntu branch. Something a bit more edgy and up-to-date than Debian Stable or RHEL, but not so much that it constantly upends your users.
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If I were Mark Shuttleworth's technical advisor, I'd suggest examining RedHat's Fedora model. Create a small group called Canonical Labs where stuff like Mir and Unity can flourish, with continuous releases and without the artificial constraint of a set release date.
This brings a different kind of problem, which is that there becomes a whole new management level of keeping the two groups in sync. Otherwise, the "Canonical Labs" group might run off and do all kinds of things that are great, but which never get integrated into the main project.
I'd sooner suggest that they just be more clear in announcing these release dates that they're very tentative estimates of when it'll be included as the default, so that people aren't so damned disappointed. That said, having an
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This brings a different kind of problem, which is that there becomes a whole new management level of keeping the two groups in sync. Otherwise, the "Canonical Labs" group might run off and do all kinds of things that are great, but which never get integrated into the main project.
But PARC was so successful! Oh, wait... ;-)
Your point is well taken. I believe it's a problem they already have, though: the Mir slip, shipping Unity before it was really ready, etc. Reorganizing -- even if it's done purely in Shuttleworth's mind and not on paper -- would bring these issues to the forefront.
No big deal (Score:4, Funny)
Delays just mean they're working on perfecting and producing the best of what they're trying to develop, and that once released it'll be a crowning moment of awesome as a consequence of the delays. Just like Duke Nukem Forever.
And I'll still be running MATE (Score:2)
So get off my lawn!
Re:X got from Version 1 to Version 11 in 3 years (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, I tend to look at Chrome's version numbers as Chrome 1.xx. So we're currently at Chrome 1.33. When you realize that, the rapid release schedule make a lot more sense. Google just never plans to increment the true major version number, so they just drop it.
It's the same with Firefox. It's true major version number is around 7.0 [wikipedia.org], but it's really not far removed to just say that everything after Firefox 3.6 is part of Firefox 4.0, meaning we're on Firefox 4.27 now.
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Display server is a forced choice (Score:2)
This Mir/Weyland/X debate is NOT another KDE v.s. Gnome or Emacs v.s. VI. In those debates every user is able to choose what they prefer.
The display server choice is made by the software writer, not the end user. If the end user wants to use a particular piece of software, they will have to use the display server that the software requires. There is no choice.
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You are aware of that Ubuntu has the same thing, right? On 12.04 and older you can install it from the alternate CD installer, just select to do a minimal install at the boot screen. Later releases moved it to the server CD install but the result should be the same. It basically installs the ubuntu-minimal meta package and nothing else.
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Hurd vs Linux ? Awesome! Not..
At the moment this is looking more like Hurd vs Plan 9. Neither wayland nor Mir have mass appeal or momentum.
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