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."
There's hope yet (Score:2)
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.
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Just use Xubuntu then. Since ubuntu 11.something I have liked the interface less and less. Then that unity/gnome 3.0 mess came about and I switched to XFCE until Mate brought back the good ol days of Gnome 2.
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Next step was going to be the xfce flavor of mint...but Xubuntu has been working just fine so I have had no reason to switch. I don't think I am set up on a LTS release, so I might make the switch to mint when the updates stop. The computer is getting pretty long in the tooth though...
Block social recommendation from resolving (Score:2)
I don't think people realize how much overhead some of those tiebacks to facebook/twitter/etc (for tracking/commenting features) add to their site.
Have them block the social recommendation crap from resolving using a hosts file, and they'll realize when they see how much faster pages load. I think APK is on to something.
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Re:There's hope yet (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A big thumb up for XFCE from me. It runs fast, is relatively bug-free, and has plenty of configurability. However a little tweak which I like to do is turn off the default compositor and replace it with Compton. It is slick, does not suffer from tearing problems, and offers some extra eye candy with fade in/out and shadow effects.
This kind of setup runs as fast as Windows, which is very fast these days. However on that Linux setup you will also get lower memory consumption, I was hovering around 150MB when in an empty desktop. A Windows desktop grabs about 500MB (you can crank that slightly down by disabling some services, but it is usually not worth the effort).
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I've switched to XFCE as well. Absolutely no problems. I was up and running at my original Gnome2 spped with half an hour. My only issues thus far have been with 13.04. A lot of the XFCE applets stopped working (as they were actually wrapped Gnome 2 applets), and there were themeing issues.
Personally, I don't care what Ubuntu do anymore. I've spent the last 4 upgrades fixing things they break for no reason and getting rid of horrible UI redesigns. I'm not waiting to see what they've broken in XFCE this time
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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.
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For me the bigger mistake that Canonical made was to drop official support for Unit
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For something lighter in the QT world, RazorQT is fantastic. I run Razor + KDE apps.
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I can find a single appealing modern desktop.
Samsung reinvented tiling windows for android! In 2013 they are selling this as a big new feature!
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.
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What progress does Unity actually bring? New does not mean better.
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Seriously though, Unity has a steep learning curve but once you're used to it it is a lot better than hierarchical menus. The HUD (click on 'Alt') is very powerful, and customisable, just takes a while.
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?
Re:There's hope yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Because fanboys.
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It's good as long as they use a common interface.
KDE, Gnome, XFCE and Unity all use the X display server right now.
However, with this move, some of those will use Wayland, some will use MIR, and some will be able to use both.
As long as the parts are interchangable - great. But as soon as interfaces change, it's generally bad.
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Competition is great where you can run multiple choices in parallel, it's not so great when you can only pick one. I don't know who the heck considers the ALSA/OSS/aRts/PulseAudio/JACK FUBAR a benefit of open source, I see that more as a bad case of not invented here, reinventing the wheel and lack of cooperation, my gold standard for things like that is Linux the kernel which has kept it all together and still makes great progress. The display server is another one of those mutually exclusive choices, it's
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You're mixing your audio solutions. ALSA and OSS are the drivers. aRts and PulseAudio are audio servers and APIs for applications to play sound if the don't want to use the drivers directly. And JACK is to chain multiple applications together in an audio-processing chain.
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> Why are two competing display server stacks considered a problem in this case?
Device drivers. The display server isn't just another piece of user level software. It drives one of the key bits of hardware in the entire system.
It can quite literally mean the difference between a machine being very respectable or being a doorstop.
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Because Ubuntu has no real reason to develop Mir, and it's a huge waste of resources.
Most of the *nix world is backing up Wayland as a replacement for X, and Cannonical, with no actual justification, went it's own way to develop Mir. This means porting things like gtk, qt, etc, etc over to Mir. It also means that porting software to/from Ubuntu is now a bit more complicated.
While there are thing where you benefit from variety (ie: music player, paint app), some things just add overhead, with no actual benef
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...
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What he's saying is "WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE SHAREHOLDERS?!"
fuck fuck fuck the slashfilter
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.
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Ok, this is at least a valid reason.
I do find it very odd, to say the least, that Canonical is being criticised though.
The criticism should be levelled at the hardware vendors who won't provide open drivers.
I just find it an odd state of affairs when a non-copyleft project (Wayland) is favoured over a copyleft project (Mir) because of proprietary drivers.
Why are we limiting ourselves because of proprietary drivers?
It's all backward.
Anyway...
When the HW vendors license others' patents (Score:2)
The criticism should be levelled at the hardware vendors who won't provide open drivers.
Or, just as likely, the upstream patent holders who prohibit the hardware vendors from providing open drivers.
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The criticism should be levelled at the hardware vendors who won't provide open drivers.
You mean those hardware vendors who pay to license other vendors' proprietary technology, and aren't allowed to open source the parts of the code that have been licensed from elsewhere?
Why are we limiting ourselves because of proprietary drivers?
Why are you limiting yourself to open source drivers?
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Actually, Ubuntu's Mir uses Android drivers, doesn't it? Ubuntu having been so focused in mobile and Adreno 3xx GPUs being quite able to render 1080p graphics (I'd love to see a comparison between Adreno 3xx and Intel 3xxx, BTW, to have an idea of where mobile GPUs stand in terms of performance), I can see why they'd go that route, to avoid the trap of ending up with good software but no hardware backers nor drivers. And, as shitty as Unity is for the desktop, it seems to work well on phones.
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... and a new user is supposed to know what all of this even is, let alone how to install them? Then, once it's installed, they are supposed to realize that "session" actually means "environment" or more newbie-likely "theme" on the login screen?
(the use of "session" for this is completely braindead IMO, I don't understand how your desktop manager has anything to do with the concept of a session)
xubuntu-desktop installed fine. Cannot reproduce. (Score:2)
The best part of trying to change your desktop environment on Ubuntu is how it then tries to uninstall your entire operating system. busybox, the linux kernel, and everything else.
I didn't see that misbehavior when I switched from Unity to Xfce by typing sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop back in the 11.10 days.
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And the GNOME project was utterly redundant given the existence of KDE....
Qt wasn't free software (Score:2)
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QT was 'free' at that point in time, with the stipulation that should it ever become non-free the last free version would be forever open.
GNOME is 10 months older than free Qt (Score:2)
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Not really. Gnome was an alternative, and could run software designed for KDE just fine. No extra effort was necesary to port each application (as happens with Wayland/Mir).
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Re:There's hope yet (Score:5, Funny)
One question: what do you think Wayland and Mir will look like in five years, especially if you're leaving out highly desirable features from day one?
Dude seriously. The latency of X is killing me. Have you seen, the signals have to make 4 extra IPC calls before they're seen by the application. By my count that adds at least 40ms of latency.
Oh hang on a mo.
Looks like the turbo button isn't pressed and my 386 SX/25 was only running at 4MHz.
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Brilliant! Compact and telling. Mod up.
Re:There's hope yet (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, yeah, cue all the "X11 is crufty and nobody needs all those awesome features it has". Sure. Right. One question: what do you think Wayland and Mir will look like in five years, especially if you're leaving out highly desirable features from day one?
The problem is that X11 doesn't have "awesome features". It has a critical path which acts as a bottleneck and a bunch of crap that nobody uses any more. And increasingly it has a bunch of extensions trying to work around the framework's deficiencies which reside in their own processes and increase the render and network latency.
So whatever form Wayland takes the chances are it'll be a damned sight more maintainable than X11.
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: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]
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The Wayland folks were the X11 folks. X11 doesn't have any folks anymore.
With a cynic's hat on, Wayland is the new pet project of the guys who used to do X11, and they'll move heaven and earth (including smearing X11) to get people to adopt their shiny new product. It is against their interests for anyone to claim that X11 doesn't need wholesale replacing, or that the replacement should look different to how Wayland looks.
(With the cynic's hat removed- I honestly don't have an opinion. I'm not close enough
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You do realize that "the Wayland folks" and the X11 folks are the same folks, right?
Yes, I certainly mean that. This is what's so disengenuous. They know X11 well enough to know the claims that they are making are very, very dubious. This is one of the things that's so disappointing in the whole affair.
Don't forget it was also the X11 (and now Wayland) folks who removed the thing to kill active grabs on the grounds that it "shouldn't" be needed. Very user hostile move that.
For goodness sake, X is badly in n
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I'm of the opinion that it was time for X12, not a replacement.
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That's not true. It is the X Windows System, Version 11. It has gone through major revisions over the years, but somehow stopped in the 80s. Also, we somehow ended up with all X.org becoming the only X system people care about - other X servers (XFree86 and XSun, for example) seem to have faded out.
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X's deficiencies are in its architecture rather than any noticeable performance issues. In many ways its similar to the whole pulse audio thing. The code is going to be much better, provide better capabilities, and introduce a bunch of annoying bugs and other issues along the way.
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].
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I concur! The ditch of X11 is more political than technical. X11 has become so entrenched within itself that the notion of dropping all of the old crap that gets in the way from making good drivers, is hard to fathom.
X.org does not equal the X developers alone. X11 was good while it lasted, but it was high time to start developing something for a new generation of developers and devices. X could have been that, but the inertia within the group to change anything was just too much for devs to deal with.
Paging granularity (Score:2)
[Old X11 cruft is] paged out on disk taking up no resources if it's really not being used
Not if your computer doesn't use a paging file. (It's common for handheld devices not to use one because of NAND flash wear considerations.) And not if the old X11 cruft happens to have been placed in the same 4 KiB page as a heavily used part of the code.
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Which highly desirable features are you referring to?
In case you meant network transparency, X11 doesn't have that anymore either. Sure, you can run xterm remotely with decent performance, but as soon as you start using client-rendered fonts (the only way to get anti-aliasing), gradients or lots of images, performance of X11 becomes so slow that the networking can no longer be considered "transparent". Overall you'll probably get better performance from VNC than from X11.
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You have no clue what you're talking about.
VNC is a joke. It can't even manage simple things across a LAN. On the other hand, X can handle media intensive applications under the same conditions.
X isn't designed well for the WAN but it's an easy enough problem to solve.
So X runs better across the Internet than VNC does across the LAN.
Regardless, the X approach to network transparency is now the norm rather than the exception. If you gut Linux in this regard you are putting it at a disadvantage and setting it
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What's with you?
You come into all these threads claiming you do stuff and people keep telling you you don't. You need to start ignoring the flawed evidence of your eyes and accept the fact that X is bad.
Just accept it.
It will make the transition much easier.
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I think you need to update your sarcasm filters.
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Some years ago I tried using KDE3 from a machine on the same floor, using Exceed and a win32 build of Xorg as the X servers. If I disabled rounded window corners and picked a theme without gradients, it was somewhat usable, but not as responsive as I'd like (this was my main dev box). I ended up switching to NX, which worked very well for me.
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That's due to issues with the win32 versions of X in my experience. I use an IBM 600E (Pentium 2 with 96MB RAM running Red Hat 9) as a remote X client to a lot of systems without issue (XDMCP to Solaris, IRIX, and Linux).
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It's not about feature, it's about X being unmaintanable, huge, and impossible to understand.
This video [linux.org.au] is extremely insightful, and quite worth watching.
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There's hope
I really don't think there is hope. Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth have shown a level of stubbornness and indifference that I don't believe can be explained as a function of any rational thought process. Distrowatch, for what it's worth, has Ubuntu in the #3 spot behind Debian itself during the last six months. Mint is coming up on x2 Ubuntu's hits.
Ubuntu hasn't hit bottom yet. It is going to have to fall much further before these people get the message, apparently.
The best thing we can do is continue th
Re:There's hope yet (Score:5, Informative)
You specified Ubuntu GNOME, yet the article was about Ubuntu in particular. Despite Ubuntu GNOME being Ubuntu based, I had expected that if anything, they would be supporting Wayland. Did the Ubuntu GNOME group express any sort of interest in Mir?
No the point is that when Ubuntu switches to Mir, Ubuntu gnome will have to replace the whole graphics server and compositor rather than just teh display manager, amd to get advantage of Weyland use Weyland-enabled apps. It probaby won't be worth doing - the resulting system would be so different that you may as well have your own debian based distribution as making a variant of Ubuntu.
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.
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Wouldn't Mint be what you're talking about? It's already more grandma-friendly than Ubuntu. Or does it not count since it's based on Ubuntu?
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it kinda amazed me that all there was to move was the bookmarks. no photos, no documents, not even anything in the downloads folder! this laptop was about a year and a half old and basically stock.
The only thing she really did was print recipes and joke email.
So the only thing I would say is that the Printing support in ChromeOS is crappy by design.
"Buy a cloud printer" doesnt really do it
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Yeah, they really need to offer a cloud printer box or something. It would interface via USB/network/whatever to the printer, and would connect in to cloud print. Config would all be via the web - perhaps via Google's website (you plug in the device, it does dhcp and registers with Google, and then you log into google cloud print and register the device using its serial number or whatever). I have an Ecobee thermostat that was registered in a similar way - you just configure the thermostat itself enough
Library (Score:2)
a user with limited/low bandwith
I think the idea is that people living where the only affordable home Internet access is dial-up would carry the Chromebook to a branch of the county library to do large data transfers.
there is little users in this side
Other Slashdot users have repeatedly told me that people with niche needs need to suck it up and accept that products and services that lack economies of scale will have inflated prices. The cliche they use is "You are an edge case."
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True the compositor stack must be replaced, but most QT or GTK application require just other libraries.
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The only difference here is that a Linux user has access to this information. Most Mac users don't know anything about the Mach BSD kernel or the Quartz compositor, but it doesn't stop them from using the system.
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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.
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Was it pure failure,or today's sick fascination with 'mobile' that would lead a 'modern-replacement-for-X' project to have "multi-monitor issues"?I
The thing is that Weyland is just as mobile friendly as Mir: The freedesktop site says [freedesktop.org]: "The Weston compositor is a minimal and fast compositor and is suitable for many embedded and mobile use cases".
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Even in 10.7 you can't extend a single wallpaper across two monitors. You can cut to images from one larger picture yourself and make it look like one wallpaper, or have the same one twice. Both of which would be fine in 1999, but not in 2013.
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And wasn't Apple the company with the reputation for delivering remotely-usable-by-people-who-are-neither-uber-geeks-nor-UNIX-workstation-buyers multi-monitor support atypically early in the game, somtime back in the classic era?
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You can't do it in Windows easily either - you have to stitch two wallpapers together in the right order for your monitor configuration. Of course, there are tools to do this, but that's what they do in the background. Though not all of them do it "right", especially w
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Was it pure failure,or today's sick fascination with 'mobile' that would lead a 'modern-replacement-for-X'
Not even that. Maemo/Meego which by all accounts were slick and responsive used X. You could even change the window manager if you liked, since it was standard X.
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Was it pure failure,or today's sick fascination with 'mobile' that would lead a 'modern-replacement-for-X' project to have "multi-monitor issues"?
Neither. One of the things being glossed over or ignored by most of the discussion here is that Mir is working absolutely fine (including with multiple monitors). The issue causing them to "undefault" Mir is that XMir is not as complete and stable as they would like when apps that require X11 try to operate in multi-monitor mode (XMir is a compatibility layer between Mir and X).
In other words, the "weirdness sometimes experience in that area with classic X" in fact IS the problem, or at least the major con
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Mod up. He gets the article.
Government shutdown (Score:2)
I'll never badmouth a group for delaying a release when the product isn't done yet.
Not even a product with a strict deadline, like an annual budget for the national government?
I hope not (Score:1)
Otherwise the Russians will be pissed!
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Offtopic? [wikipedia.org]
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.
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Has pulse ever gotten to that point?
Maybe they should first get rid of Unity. It sucks. It assumes you have one app open at a time, so there is no one step way to pick the 4th window of some application you have. It hates tons of apps like Rdesktop. You get a ? for an icon and if you dare open more than one you again have no way to select a single one. Tiling window managers are more useful.
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What they should do is simply get rid of it.
It also breaks focus follows mouse. It is not elegant with multiple work spaces, it makes it a pain to use multiple windows at the same time.
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Maybe they should first get rid of Unity. It sucks. It assumes you have one app open at a time, so there is no one step way to pick the 4th window of some application you have.
You can click the application icon again and then it shows a thumbnail gallery of all the app's windows.
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Which adds another step! and obscures my view of my current desktop!
What wonderful progress.
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Not running maximized? You're "holding it wrong":p (Score:2)
Maybe they should first get rid of Unity. It sucks. It assumes you have one app open at a time [...] Tiling window managers are more useful.
I thought we already established in the thread about Slashdot's new layout [slashdot.org] that most people maximize one window to fill the screen and don't use tiling window managers. For example: "Low-level creatures like us can only read one webpage at a time. It makes a lot more sense for us to have one window open and some of us prefer that window to be fullscreen." [slashdot.org] I mentioned that people could keep two web pages side by side [slashdot.org], and people reacted as if Steve Jobs had told them they were "holding it wrong"
Big cudos for trying! (Score:5, Interesting)
Both to RedHat and Cannonical for actually trying to innovate in this space.
At least one of the projects will fail and there will be instability for those trying out the new solutions, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't try. I love seeing this because whatever happens, it will make desktop Linux more fun!
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RedHat isn't the only Wayland supporter. Its more like Canonical is supporting Mir, and everyone else is working on Wayland.
If you dont like Ubuntu's direction.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Go and try Debian. There is a reason why they have a huge following and most of what people like in Ubuntu is there in debian with none of what people dislike.
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no, while a great server distro Debian does not put the thought and effort to make the common Linux dekstop components work together, it's a ragged mess that needs hours of manual fixing. other distros derived from Debian DO put in the effort so things have some hope of being configured to work together.
Debian desktop is a huge waste of time.
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no, they missed. Linux Mint makes Ubuntu work in the real world
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.
Oh Cononical (Score:2)