XMir postponed in Ubuntu(lists.ubuntu.com)
lists.ubuntu.com
XMir postponed in Ubuntu
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2013-October/037695.html
114 comments
I really want Mir to die. Unless I'm misunderstanding the situation Wayland vs. Mir is going to be a massive headache for linux, and afaict Mir exists for no technical reason; it exists because Canonical don't want to play in anyone else's sandpit.
I doubt it is going to matter much. The major toolkits will continue to support X11 backends for the foreseeable future, and systems with both Wayland and Mir will be shipping with X servers by default for the foreseeable future and likely with X servers as optional packages "forever" afterwards.
It is going to be an issue for people doing low-level/backend GUI stuff and pretty much nobody else.
It is going to be an issue for people doing low-level/backend GUI stuff and pretty much nobody else.
> It is going to be an issue for people doing low-level/backend GUI stuff and pretty much nobody else.
or people who write so-called "suckless" software; most of the things i run on my desktop (notable exceptions including my browser, anki, and perhaps one or two other programs) directly include xlib / import xlib bindings rather than gtk, qt, etc.
or people who write so-called "suckless" software; most of the things i run on my desktop (notable exceptions including my browser, anki, and perhaps one or two other programs) directly include xlib / import xlib bindings rather than gtk, qt, etc.
It is going to be an issue for everybody else because when things dont work as they should, and they wont because now there is two backends to support for the toolkits, it will be Wayland here and Mir there, completely useless for the user, but what will you say in the error message "Something stopped working, sorry?".
Just like alsa, oss, jack, esd and pulseaudio.
I never wanted to touch pulseaudio with a ten-foot pole, it is kept away from my systems in every form. Yet Ive seen apps complain about pulseaudio and have it in their settings by default, then not working and telling me to fix my pulseaudio installation.
There will be apps developed by Ubuntu for Mir that will just cause problems when others try to run them on Wayland.
Just like alsa, oss, jack, esd and pulseaudio.
I never wanted to touch pulseaudio with a ten-foot pole, it is kept away from my systems in every form. Yet Ive seen apps complain about pulseaudio and have it in their settings by default, then not working and telling me to fix my pulseaudio installation.
There will be apps developed by Ubuntu for Mir that will just cause problems when others try to run them on Wayland.
Yet despite all of your issues, Ubuntu is by now by far the smoothest desktop experience I've had, and I suspect that's the experience most users have. Pretty much everything just works, and a lot of that I believe is squarely because they are perfectly happy to break convention if that is what it takes for them to get where they want to be.
> and they wont because now there is two backends to support for the toolkits
Both Qt and GTK have far more than just two backends already, yet they keep working. Two more is hardly going to be vastly more difficult to get right.
E.g. Gtk has Windows and OS X versions, as well as a HTML5 backend, and a DirectFB backend. And presumably the X backend will stay around too.
> but what will you say in the error message "Something stopped working, sorry?".
What does it say today if the X server fails?
> I never wanted to touch pulseaudio with a ten-foot pole, it is kept away from my systems in every form. Yet Ive seen apps complain about pulseaudio and have it in their settings by default, then not working and telling me to fix my pulseaudio installation.
So either don't use those apps, fix them, or install Pulse Audio anyway. It's not app developers obligation to make things keep working on every bizarre configuration around.
If you want a conservative distribution, perhaps you will be happier with Debian.
> There will be apps developed by Ubuntu for Mir that will just cause problems when others try to run them on Wayland.
If people write their apps to run straight on Mir, sure. Just as if people write their code to target any library that isn't universally available.
But just like exceedingly few people target X directly without a toolkit or wrapper, I think it'll be exceedingly unlikely that lots of people will clamour to write code targeting Mir directly. Much less likely than depending on pulse-audio functionality, for example.
> and they wont because now there is two backends to support for the toolkits
Both Qt and GTK have far more than just two backends already, yet they keep working. Two more is hardly going to be vastly more difficult to get right.
E.g. Gtk has Windows and OS X versions, as well as a HTML5 backend, and a DirectFB backend. And presumably the X backend will stay around too.
> but what will you say in the error message "Something stopped working, sorry?".
What does it say today if the X server fails?
> I never wanted to touch pulseaudio with a ten-foot pole, it is kept away from my systems in every form. Yet Ive seen apps complain about pulseaudio and have it in their settings by default, then not working and telling me to fix my pulseaudio installation.
So either don't use those apps, fix them, or install Pulse Audio anyway. It's not app developers obligation to make things keep working on every bizarre configuration around.
If you want a conservative distribution, perhaps you will be happier with Debian.
> There will be apps developed by Ubuntu for Mir that will just cause problems when others try to run them on Wayland.
If people write their apps to run straight on Mir, sure. Just as if people write their code to target any library that isn't universally available.
But just like exceedingly few people target X directly without a toolkit or wrapper, I think it'll be exceedingly unlikely that lots of people will clamour to write code targeting Mir directly. Much less likely than depending on pulse-audio functionality, for example.
So what you are saying, really, is that it's okay to have 5 different ways of playing audio on the machine?
Do we need three different display servers/ways to show things on screen? No, we do not.
If we managed to focus our efforts on one project to display things, one project to play audio, and so on, we would not need wrappers that are able to handle 5 different servers, and perhaps we could spend some energy improving a lot of other things that are broken.
Besides wanting to control the market or something, why does Canonical need Mir? Why do we need it?
Is it a better implementation than Wayland? And if it is, have there been arguments within/with Wayland as to why it's being done in a way that is not good?
I'm more of a hobby linux user (mostly personal servers, occasional desktop), I have not followed the Wayland/Mir conflict more than I know that Wayland was created and it's supposed to replace X, and then later Canonical makes Mir to do the exact same thing.
It's very common within the linux community, see every window manager ever. How many tiling managers are there again?
GTK and KDE? And so on.
Choice is good, but I believe that if we keep making a new "Y" every time we disagree with someone we will just end up a even more fragmented community than we are now, moving in no direction.
I guess until the community manages to communicate, linux will remain mostly used on servers and by interested parties that want to configure everything.
Do we need three different display servers/ways to show things on screen? No, we do not.
If we managed to focus our efforts on one project to display things, one project to play audio, and so on, we would not need wrappers that are able to handle 5 different servers, and perhaps we could spend some energy improving a lot of other things that are broken.
Besides wanting to control the market or something, why does Canonical need Mir? Why do we need it?
Is it a better implementation than Wayland? And if it is, have there been arguments within/with Wayland as to why it's being done in a way that is not good?
I'm more of a hobby linux user (mostly personal servers, occasional desktop), I have not followed the Wayland/Mir conflict more than I know that Wayland was created and it's supposed to replace X, and then later Canonical makes Mir to do the exact same thing.
It's very common within the linux community, see every window manager ever. How many tiling managers are there again?
GTK and KDE? And so on.
Choice is good, but I believe that if we keep making a new "Y" every time we disagree with someone we will just end up a even more fragmented community than we are now, moving in no direction.
I guess until the community manages to communicate, linux will remain mostly used on servers and by interested parties that want to configure everything.
> So what you are saying, really, is that it's okay to have 5 different ways of playing audio on the machine?
Absolutely. Just like we have numerous alternatives from the kernel and up (whether different patch-sets against mainline Linux, and entirely different open source "Unixy" kernels). Including different C library alternatives; a ton of different shells; a ton of non-X based display servers; a ton of browsers, UI toolkits etc.
They are all there because someone wanted something not available to them in the other alternatives and chose to invest their time and/or money to make it happen. How is that not okay? We're not forced to use their contributions - numerous solutions have "died" or been confined to obscurity over the years because they never caught on. Entire distributions even.
> Do we need three different display servers/ways to show things on screen? No, we do not.
We already have far more. Some are mostly dead, like GGI, Y Window System, Berlin/Fresco, NeWS and many more. Some are used in (often very) niche areas, like NanoGUI/MicroWindows (a tiny embedded display server with dual API's - one somewhat X compatible and one more Window-ish) and DirectFB. Some low level, such as direct framebuffer access. Some are abstraction layers, like SDL.
Many of these overlap in that they can use one or the other as a backend to display on.
The point is: Users pick the winners, and the vast majority of development effort for everyone else goes into "just" supporting a small number of the "winners" - the other ones are "on their own".
And this is why Mir vs. Wayland at this point is largely academic: Users will pick a winner. If Mir does not offer advantages but causes disadvantages, Canonical will either lose users or change course. Time will settle this, and there's no reason to worry about it.
> If we managed to focus our efforts on one project to display things, one project to play audio, and so on, we would not need wrappers that are able to handle 5 different servers, and perhaps we could spend some energy improving a lot of other things that are broken.
The flaw with this argument is that it assumes that what one group wants matches what everyone else wants.
This is not a company with a single goal, but thousands on thousands of individuals, companies and groups with divergent goal. We consist of people who want Linux to run on tiny embedded devices (I've worked on some), some with no UI, who would be best suited if all the effort on audio and video was invested in shrinking kernel size instead; we consist of people who want Linux running better across giant NUMA clusters of thousands of CPU's; we consist of people who want Linux running better on phones and touch devices with tiny screens; we consist of people that want a great desktop; and people who think the idea of a Linux desktop is pointless.
Furthermore, we only "see" these battles because they happen within "our" sphere of interest. What about the numerous (and we're talking dozens) of other open source OS's? Some with userbases in the single digits (e.g. consider our hellbanned "friend" TempleOS with his amazing dedication to his own OS). Nobody reasonably expects them to all put down their work and "focus". I've submitted patches to AROS for example (an AmigaOS like OS). One might have asked why I did not "focus" on some important Linux system instead. The answer of course is that it was my time to spend, and my goal with spending it on AROS would not be met by spending it on something else.
> Besides wanting to control the market or something, why does Canonical need Mir? Why do we need it?
A number of people do believe their technical differences are sufficient to merit the difference. But control might very well be it, and it is often a good one, and it's worth reminding everyone that "political reasons" are often behind major splits in the open source community, but the results are often very different from expected.
E.g. GNOME started largely because of issues with Qt licensing, but the licensing issues are now moot, but the projects have taken wildly divergent paths in some areas (and agreed on common standards in many others). While the original reason was annoying, in the end, I for one is still happy we have GNOME as a result as I still don't like the feel of KDE (purely subjective; I'm sure it's fine for those who use it).
What is GCC today was once EGCS - a fork that split off from mainline GCC because the GCC maintainers were too slow to accept patches. Eventually the fork was resolved when EGCS in effect became the official, blessed version.
Clang is another example of something that at least got major backing (from Apple) largely on the basis of licensing: They don't want to upgrade to a GCC version covered by GPLv3. While many object to their rather obvious reason (given their choice not to upgrade software that have relicensed), we're better off for having the competition.
Even the X.org X server is the result of "politics" with the XFree86 team. At the time one could have easily argued that it was unnecessary, but it gave us a new wave of innovation within X, many changes which are part of the inspiration for Wayland (and thus Mir too).
> Choice is good, but I believe that if we keep making a new "Y" every time we disagree with someone we will just end up a even more fragmented community than we are now, moving in no direction.
Keep in mind that "moving in no direction" is far better for many of us than moving in the wrong direction. If you don't agree with the decisions behind Wayland, countering it by supporting Mir may be preferable to letting Wayland win by default.
> I guess until the community manages to communicate, linux will remain mostly used on servers and by interested parties that want to configure everything.
That'd be perfectly fine, but keep in mind that Linux grew as big as it did on the server side exactly because everyone are able to do their own thing, and the stuff that "sticks" or that everyone can agree on tends to eventually become part of mainline. As a result of that openness, Linux can run in some form or other (sometimes with extensive patches, sure) on everything from a non-MMU x86 (in the form of ELKS) via smartphones and tiny embedded platforms, to massive single-image supercomputers or multi-image supercomputers/clusters.
And on the "desktop", Linux is finally making inroads underpinning Android, ChromeOS, and yes, "desktop" distributions like Ubuntu that are seeing the occasional massive organisational roll out as well as slowly making inroads in the "normal" desktop market.
I'm not too concerned about desktop Linux becoming mainstream. We're already at a stage where for many users distributions like Ubuntu are far less painful than e.g. Windows (my printers, for example, are supported by Ubuntu out of the box, but require a driver download of tens of MB full of crap we don't want for Windows), and where many users have multiple computers running Linux without even realising. E.g. I have Linux on my fileserver (and most turnkey NAS boxes today tend to run Linux), my wifi router, my phones (Android), tablet (Android), my TV streaming boxes (an old WDTV Live running a MIPS version of Linux as well as an Android "TV stick") and more.
Linux in some form or another is likely already on more consumer devices than Windows will ever be on. That it hasn't taken over the desktop market (so far, anyway) matters less and less, as it's making sufficient inroads to address what used to be the major pain point: Lack of driver support from reluctant or outright hostile hardware manufacturers. That is what matters to me. Of course others will have other concerns. And some of them will donate their time, and/or money, to projects that in some cases will take Linux in totally different directions than what I'd like to see. That's cool too.
Absolutely. Just like we have numerous alternatives from the kernel and up (whether different patch-sets against mainline Linux, and entirely different open source "Unixy" kernels). Including different C library alternatives; a ton of different shells; a ton of non-X based display servers; a ton of browsers, UI toolkits etc.
They are all there because someone wanted something not available to them in the other alternatives and chose to invest their time and/or money to make it happen. How is that not okay? We're not forced to use their contributions - numerous solutions have "died" or been confined to obscurity over the years because they never caught on. Entire distributions even.
> Do we need three different display servers/ways to show things on screen? No, we do not.
We already have far more. Some are mostly dead, like GGI, Y Window System, Berlin/Fresco, NeWS and many more. Some are used in (often very) niche areas, like NanoGUI/MicroWindows (a tiny embedded display server with dual API's - one somewhat X compatible and one more Window-ish) and DirectFB. Some low level, such as direct framebuffer access. Some are abstraction layers, like SDL.
Many of these overlap in that they can use one or the other as a backend to display on.
The point is: Users pick the winners, and the vast majority of development effort for everyone else goes into "just" supporting a small number of the "winners" - the other ones are "on their own".
And this is why Mir vs. Wayland at this point is largely academic: Users will pick a winner. If Mir does not offer advantages but causes disadvantages, Canonical will either lose users or change course. Time will settle this, and there's no reason to worry about it.
> If we managed to focus our efforts on one project to display things, one project to play audio, and so on, we would not need wrappers that are able to handle 5 different servers, and perhaps we could spend some energy improving a lot of other things that are broken.
The flaw with this argument is that it assumes that what one group wants matches what everyone else wants.
This is not a company with a single goal, but thousands on thousands of individuals, companies and groups with divergent goal. We consist of people who want Linux to run on tiny embedded devices (I've worked on some), some with no UI, who would be best suited if all the effort on audio and video was invested in shrinking kernel size instead; we consist of people who want Linux running better across giant NUMA clusters of thousands of CPU's; we consist of people who want Linux running better on phones and touch devices with tiny screens; we consist of people that want a great desktop; and people who think the idea of a Linux desktop is pointless.
Furthermore, we only "see" these battles because they happen within "our" sphere of interest. What about the numerous (and we're talking dozens) of other open source OS's? Some with userbases in the single digits (e.g. consider our hellbanned "friend" TempleOS with his amazing dedication to his own OS). Nobody reasonably expects them to all put down their work and "focus". I've submitted patches to AROS for example (an AmigaOS like OS). One might have asked why I did not "focus" on some important Linux system instead. The answer of course is that it was my time to spend, and my goal with spending it on AROS would not be met by spending it on something else.
> Besides wanting to control the market or something, why does Canonical need Mir? Why do we need it?
A number of people do believe their technical differences are sufficient to merit the difference. But control might very well be it, and it is often a good one, and it's worth reminding everyone that "political reasons" are often behind major splits in the open source community, but the results are often very different from expected.
E.g. GNOME started largely because of issues with Qt licensing, but the licensing issues are now moot, but the projects have taken wildly divergent paths in some areas (and agreed on common standards in many others). While the original reason was annoying, in the end, I for one is still happy we have GNOME as a result as I still don't like the feel of KDE (purely subjective; I'm sure it's fine for those who use it).
What is GCC today was once EGCS - a fork that split off from mainline GCC because the GCC maintainers were too slow to accept patches. Eventually the fork was resolved when EGCS in effect became the official, blessed version.
Clang is another example of something that at least got major backing (from Apple) largely on the basis of licensing: They don't want to upgrade to a GCC version covered by GPLv3. While many object to their rather obvious reason (given their choice not to upgrade software that have relicensed), we're better off for having the competition.
Even the X.org X server is the result of "politics" with the XFree86 team. At the time one could have easily argued that it was unnecessary, but it gave us a new wave of innovation within X, many changes which are part of the inspiration for Wayland (and thus Mir too).
> Choice is good, but I believe that if we keep making a new "Y" every time we disagree with someone we will just end up a even more fragmented community than we are now, moving in no direction.
Keep in mind that "moving in no direction" is far better for many of us than moving in the wrong direction. If you don't agree with the decisions behind Wayland, countering it by supporting Mir may be preferable to letting Wayland win by default.
> I guess until the community manages to communicate, linux will remain mostly used on servers and by interested parties that want to configure everything.
That'd be perfectly fine, but keep in mind that Linux grew as big as it did on the server side exactly because everyone are able to do their own thing, and the stuff that "sticks" or that everyone can agree on tends to eventually become part of mainline. As a result of that openness, Linux can run in some form or other (sometimes with extensive patches, sure) on everything from a non-MMU x86 (in the form of ELKS) via smartphones and tiny embedded platforms, to massive single-image supercomputers or multi-image supercomputers/clusters.
And on the "desktop", Linux is finally making inroads underpinning Android, ChromeOS, and yes, "desktop" distributions like Ubuntu that are seeing the occasional massive organisational roll out as well as slowly making inroads in the "normal" desktop market.
I'm not too concerned about desktop Linux becoming mainstream. We're already at a stage where for many users distributions like Ubuntu are far less painful than e.g. Windows (my printers, for example, are supported by Ubuntu out of the box, but require a driver download of tens of MB full of crap we don't want for Windows), and where many users have multiple computers running Linux without even realising. E.g. I have Linux on my fileserver (and most turnkey NAS boxes today tend to run Linux), my wifi router, my phones (Android), tablet (Android), my TV streaming boxes (an old WDTV Live running a MIPS version of Linux as well as an Android "TV stick") and more.
Linux in some form or another is likely already on more consumer devices than Windows will ever be on. That it hasn't taken over the desktop market (so far, anyway) matters less and less, as it's making sufficient inroads to address what used to be the major pain point: Lack of driver support from reluctant or outright hostile hardware manufacturers. That is what matters to me. Of course others will have other concerns. And some of them will donate their time, and/or money, to projects that in some cases will take Linux in totally different directions than what I'd like to see. That's cool too.
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply.
I do understand your view as well, and I share parts of it, I think that it will hopefully and probably end up helping the linux community, but I still think this midway period, if we can call it that, where we need to have several systems that basically do the same thing in a slightly different way and a bunch of different wrappers to make every system be able to run things designed for the other system is a bit tedious.
But perhaps that makes what Canonical is doing a bit good too? They are after all controlling one of the most popular distributions and pushing it in a way they think is best, which is sort of what I was arguing for that we do as a community anyway.
Linux isn't going to go away, and that is a good thing, I just doubt it will end up becoming a mainstream option for desktop computing without some serious pushing from everyone. But I guess with Valve pushing for Linux gaming (even though that might just be for their console) Linux will end up becoming more widely adopted among that crowd eventually anyway.
PS: English is a hard language to express myself in, it seems like you get the point of what I was saying, and I hope I understood you correctly when I read what you replied.
I guess very bluntly, my fear is that if we keep creating new things like this, in 30 years we will have 10 different working display managers that we have to keep running.
I hope one of them 'wins' and we can get rid of the others as soon as possible.
I do understand your view as well, and I share parts of it, I think that it will hopefully and probably end up helping the linux community, but I still think this midway period, if we can call it that, where we need to have several systems that basically do the same thing in a slightly different way and a bunch of different wrappers to make every system be able to run things designed for the other system is a bit tedious.
But perhaps that makes what Canonical is doing a bit good too? They are after all controlling one of the most popular distributions and pushing it in a way they think is best, which is sort of what I was arguing for that we do as a community anyway.
Linux isn't going to go away, and that is a good thing, I just doubt it will end up becoming a mainstream option for desktop computing without some serious pushing from everyone. But I guess with Valve pushing for Linux gaming (even though that might just be for their console) Linux will end up becoming more widely adopted among that crowd eventually anyway.
PS: English is a hard language to express myself in, it seems like you get the point of what I was saying, and I hope I understood you correctly when I read what you replied.
I guess very bluntly, my fear is that if we keep creating new things like this, in 30 years we will have 10 different working display managers that we have to keep running.
I hope one of them 'wins' and we can get rid of the others as soon as possible.
> I guess until the community manages to communicate, linux will remain mostly used on servers and by interested parties that want to configure everything.
So what? Why would (for example) the authors of the many different window managers specifically benefit from there being only one WM that fits them more-or-less well but allows more people in general to use Linux?
Or, put another way: Why should someone who is presumably an expert user (as they consider developing their own toolkit/WM/DE/audio server/foo) consider the implications of his decision on the mass-adoption of an existing piece of software he is trying to replace?
So what? Why would (for example) the authors of the many different window managers specifically benefit from there being only one WM that fits them more-or-less well but allows more people in general to use Linux?
Or, put another way: Why should someone who is presumably an expert user (as they consider developing their own toolkit/WM/DE/audio server/foo) consider the implications of his decision on the mass-adoption of an existing piece of software he is trying to replace?
Using window managers as an example was a bad choice, they are like clothes, people like different styles.
But why do we need more than one good way of displaying stuff on screens (X, Wayland, Mir, etc)? Competition is good, but not if we end up having to have them all installed and running at the same time to be able to use a linux desktop environment.
But why do we need more than one good way of displaying stuff on screens (X, Wayland, Mir, etc)? Competition is good, but not if we end up having to have them all installed and running at the same time to be able to use a linux desktop environment.
Because they are like clothes: People like different styles. Even if it may be clothes that are not visible to you.
And I think you're unnecessarily pessimistic - even if you end up having more than one running now and again, there's little reason why end users would need to notice. E.g. Wayland at least can target X - I don't know if Mir can, but there's no good reason why it couldn't be made to run on top of X. Both Wayland and Mir will have ways of running X apps. At least the Mir guys have indicated that making a layer to make code that targets Wayland run directly against Mir would be possible (after all one of the stated technical reasons for Mir is to have a core that is independent of a specific client protocol/APIs as well as indpendent of specific targets). There are X servers that will run on X for that matter.
In other words: Until the dust settles, you might occasionally find that apps written for one or the other will fire up some version of one of the the others that targets whichever system owns your display, but chances are you won't even know it is happening unless you specifically look for it.
And I think you're unnecessarily pessimistic - even if you end up having more than one running now and again, there's little reason why end users would need to notice. E.g. Wayland at least can target X - I don't know if Mir can, but there's no good reason why it couldn't be made to run on top of X. Both Wayland and Mir will have ways of running X apps. At least the Mir guys have indicated that making a layer to make code that targets Wayland run directly against Mir would be possible (after all one of the stated technical reasons for Mir is to have a core that is independent of a specific client protocol/APIs as well as indpendent of specific targets). There are X servers that will run on X for that matter.
In other words: Until the dust settles, you might occasionally find that apps written for one or the other will fire up some version of one of the the others that targets whichever system owns your display, but chances are you won't even know it is happening unless you specifically look for it.
My initial response to your comment was sharply negative. I guess I like some of the others here have a sharp reaction to PulseAudio. It seems like I've had this discussion a number of times:
A: No sound is playing.
B: Have you tried killing PulseAudio?
A: Oh nice, it works.
When I was setting up bluetooth audio recently, a lot of stuff on the web was steering towards Pulse. I held my nose and installed it and ran it. It was much harder to get any sound playing at all (I gave up, so I never did) than it was for me to just edit ~/.asoundrc to do exactly what I wanted. YMMV.
So, with that pulse-influenced bitter reaction to the comment, I took a deep breath and read it again, and I think your suggestion to just use a conservative distro is actually spot-on. And I realize that this clash has been going on in the Linux community for a long time. The kind of users who want to mess with stuff under the hood resent the attitudes of the "plebes" who think that if it's not Ubuntu's default install, it's not Linux. When I first started using Linux, the target of that resentment was Red Hat rather than Ubuntu. People hated the Red Hat defaults, people hated the poor dependency tracking of RPMs at the time, people hated that it shipped with a GCC snapshot that couldn't even build the kernel. But I think a lot of the ire was really that people thought Red Hat is Linux and Linux is Red Hat.
With that, my approach has just been to do my own thing and let the Ubuntu users worry about Ubuntu, otherwise just pretend it doesn't exist. There is a real concern though that some of these big changes that make a power user cringe will start to make its way into the more conservative distros, as popular distros tend to change people's mental picture of what "Linux" is, and software tends to be written to depend on stuff that's in the base install of a popular distro.
A: No sound is playing.
B: Have you tried killing PulseAudio?
A: Oh nice, it works.
When I was setting up bluetooth audio recently, a lot of stuff on the web was steering towards Pulse. I held my nose and installed it and ran it. It was much harder to get any sound playing at all (I gave up, so I never did) than it was for me to just edit ~/.asoundrc to do exactly what I wanted. YMMV.
So, with that pulse-influenced bitter reaction to the comment, I took a deep breath and read it again, and I think your suggestion to just use a conservative distro is actually spot-on. And I realize that this clash has been going on in the Linux community for a long time. The kind of users who want to mess with stuff under the hood resent the attitudes of the "plebes" who think that if it's not Ubuntu's default install, it's not Linux. When I first started using Linux, the target of that resentment was Red Hat rather than Ubuntu. People hated the Red Hat defaults, people hated the poor dependency tracking of RPMs at the time, people hated that it shipped with a GCC snapshot that couldn't even build the kernel. But I think a lot of the ire was really that people thought Red Hat is Linux and Linux is Red Hat.
With that, my approach has just been to do my own thing and let the Ubuntu users worry about Ubuntu, otherwise just pretend it doesn't exist. There is a real concern though that some of these big changes that make a power user cringe will start to make its way into the more conservative distros, as popular distros tend to change people's mental picture of what "Linux" is, and software tends to be written to depend on stuff that's in the base install of a popular distro.
"... Ubuntu is by now by far the smoothest desktop experience I've had"
Is that 13.10 with Mir active (ppa install at present)? I find 12.04 good but 13.10 has issues with the hardware I use.
"...and I suspect that's the experience most users have."
I trust it is most but there are hardware combinations where the experience is not as good. Slower computers with poor graphics lead to significant lag when Super key is pressed (there is a lot happening when you invoke the Dash).
Is that 13.10 with Mir active (ppa install at present)? I find 12.04 good but 13.10 has issues with the hardware I use.
"...and I suspect that's the experience most users have."
I trust it is most but there are hardware combinations where the experience is not as good. Slower computers with poor graphics lead to significant lag when Super key is pressed (there is a lot happening when you invoke the Dash).
> Yet despite all of your issues, Ubuntu is by now by far the smoothest desktop experience I've had
What else have you tried? I find the experience quite lacking and I've been using Ubuntu for over 4 years as my main OS.
> It's not app developers obligation to make things keep working on every bizarre configuration around.
Well it may not be their obligation but if they want their apps use the must support all common configurations. Adding 2 more just gives more headaches to developers.
What else have you tried? I find the experience quite lacking and I've been using Ubuntu for over 4 years as my main OS.
> It's not app developers obligation to make things keep working on every bizarre configuration around.
Well it may not be their obligation but if they want their apps use the must support all common configurations. Adding 2 more just gives more headaches to developers.
>> Yet despite all of your issues, Ubuntu is by now by far the smoothest desktop experience I've had, and I suspect that's the experience most users have
In all the time I used Ubuntu with the exact same conviction, it went through 3 different desktop environments, every time breaking things left and right, or removing features I depended on for my workflow. Like the guy you are replying to this includes forcing PulseAudio on me and breaking audio in various ways, and deprecating the Gnome 2 desktop in favor of Unity (which doesn't run in my VM because of a lack of 3D acceleration) first, and then deprecating the only viable alternative that did work in a VM (Unity2D) one release later.
Eventually I just gave up on Ubuntu and switched to Mint, which isn't perfect in itself, but at least it doesn't break my workflow on every release.
In all the time I used Ubuntu with the exact same conviction, it went through 3 different desktop environments, every time breaking things left and right, or removing features I depended on for my workflow. Like the guy you are replying to this includes forcing PulseAudio on me and breaking audio in various ways, and deprecating the Gnome 2 desktop in favor of Unity (which doesn't run in my VM because of a lack of 3D acceleration) first, and then deprecating the only viable alternative that did work in a VM (Unity2D) one release later.
Eventually I just gave up on Ubuntu and switched to Mint, which isn't perfect in itself, but at least it doesn't break my workflow on every release.
Interestingly, 9 times out of 10, when somebody says that they have had a problem with PusleAudio, they later tell me that they were using Ubuntu while it happened.
Did I say "interestingly"? I'm sorry, I think I meant "suspiciously, but not longer surprisingly".
Ubuntu ships an unstable product packaged inexpertly, sells it to users as "the certified bees knees", then heaps all blame onto other projects.
Did I say "interestingly"? I'm sorry, I think I meant "suspiciously, but not longer surprisingly".
Ubuntu ships an unstable product packaged inexpertly, sells it to users as "the certified bees knees", then heaps all blame onto other projects.
I'm not sure why you find that anecdotal number suspicious. If most PulseAudio users are using Ubuntu, of course most PulseAudio problems are going to be discovered on Ubuntu.
No as the plurality of people in my circles use other distros. I am talking about a heavily disproportionate rate of issues coming from Ubuntu users.
Or perhaps Ubuntu users have higher expectations of being able to "just buy random hardware" or include more non-technical users.
I can't really tell, as I'm not in either group, nor have ever experienced any of the dreaded Pulse Audio problems. I'm not saying I like it - but only because it "just works" for me, enough that I have not bothered to learn enough about it to have any reasons to like or dislike it. Which I suppose means I really ought to like it given how troublesome audio on Linux has been at various times over the years.
I can't really tell, as I'm not in either group, nor have ever experienced any of the dreaded Pulse Audio problems. I'm not saying I like it - but only because it "just works" for me, enough that I have not bothered to learn enough about it to have any reasons to like or dislike it. Which I suppose means I really ought to like it given how troublesome audio on Linux has been at various times over the years.
Without knowing the specific problems they experienced, this is all speculation.
Pulse works just fine on openSUSE, Fedora, Arch, etc.... I've had plenty of issues with Ubuntu, never with Pulse though....
> Yet despite all of your issues, Ubuntu is by now by far the smoothest desktop experience I've had, and I suspect that's the experience most users have. Pretty much everything just works,
Sorry, No. I installed Ubuntu for many of my friends and none of them had it after 2 months. My mistake, I fell for the propaganda that it would be somehow better and easier. But I installed ArchLinux for them with KDE and many of them still have it years later, and actually use it. The only problem is they dont upgrade any of their packages except firefox and chromium. It just works. Everything, digikam, gimp, clementine, firefox, kids games etc...
I guess the explanation is that people dont care really whats under the hood as long as it works, and marketing is a too strong force to see through. Canonical I believe has invested as much in marketing as in usability and testing.
Yes there are people out there who are not programmers or hackers who use ArchLinux for their day to day computing needs. You dont hear about them or them, because they are not on hacker news or reddit to discuss the latest Linus and Mir vs Wayland debate. Just happy users, who get frustrated when they have to boot into windows due to their wish to consume drm material, such as netflix, so frustrated in fact they stopped using netflix and found other services that arent digitally damaged. Amazing story right?
Also concerning GTK and Qt, here too the users usually wonder why the app look different, even though I spent some time making them look almost the same. It distracts just a little bit from the Kommon Desktop Environment when GIMP isnt pixel perfect.
Now with Mir and Wayland we will just have more of this weirdness, quirkiness and strange bugs. Why? Just because Canonical doesnt want to play nice with everybody else. Thats the reason. Its not technical.
> So either don't use those apps, fix them, or install Pulse Audio anyway. It's not app developers obligation to make things keep working on every bizarre configuration around.
And this is exactly the problem that Mir/Canonical introduce too GNU/Linux. Now we have more bizarre configurations to mess with and avoid.
Sorry, No. I installed Ubuntu for many of my friends and none of them had it after 2 months. My mistake, I fell for the propaganda that it would be somehow better and easier. But I installed ArchLinux for them with KDE and many of them still have it years later, and actually use it. The only problem is they dont upgrade any of their packages except firefox and chromium. It just works. Everything, digikam, gimp, clementine, firefox, kids games etc...
I guess the explanation is that people dont care really whats under the hood as long as it works, and marketing is a too strong force to see through. Canonical I believe has invested as much in marketing as in usability and testing.
Yes there are people out there who are not programmers or hackers who use ArchLinux for their day to day computing needs. You dont hear about them or them, because they are not on hacker news or reddit to discuss the latest Linus and Mir vs Wayland debate. Just happy users, who get frustrated when they have to boot into windows due to their wish to consume drm material, such as netflix, so frustrated in fact they stopped using netflix and found other services that arent digitally damaged. Amazing story right?
Also concerning GTK and Qt, here too the users usually wonder why the app look different, even though I spent some time making them look almost the same. It distracts just a little bit from the Kommon Desktop Environment when GIMP isnt pixel perfect.
Now with Mir and Wayland we will just have more of this weirdness, quirkiness and strange bugs. Why? Just because Canonical doesnt want to play nice with everybody else. Thats the reason. Its not technical.
> So either don't use those apps, fix them, or install Pulse Audio anyway. It's not app developers obligation to make things keep working on every bizarre configuration around.
And this is exactly the problem that Mir/Canonical introduce too GNU/Linux. Now we have more bizarre configurations to mess with and avoid.
Do you document your standard desktop setup?
These days, I just use Stella (a CentOS remix with multimedia codecs set up). Old versions of packages but very stable.
These days, I just use Stella (a CentOS remix with multimedia codecs set up). Old versions of packages but very stable.
> And this is exactly the problem that Mir/Canonical introduce too GNU/Linux. Now we have more bizarre configurations to mess with and avoid.
Yet despite your experience, Ubuntu has grown to be by far the most widespread Linux desktop, despite tiny resources compared to several of their competitors. Clearly someone likes it, despite your attempt to imply it's all just marketing, which is frankly insulting. Canonical does not have even a tiny fraction of the money they'd have needed to win the kind of userbase they have just off of marketing.
> and marketing is a too strong force to see through. Canonical I believe has invested as much in marketing as in usability and testing.
Maybe. But for my part I'd been using Redhat and Fedora for a decade and managed to avoid noticing any marketing for Ubuntu - I ended up trying it because I use Debian for a lot of server at work, but the Debian desktop experience is horrific. I fully expected wiping it, or at least getting rid of Unity in favour of a tiling WM or something. Instead it took about an hour of use to decide to make it my new main distro.
> You dont hear about them or them, because they are not on hacker news or reddit to discuss the latest Linus and Mir vs Wayland debate. Just happy users, who get frustrated when they have to boot into windows due to their wish to consume drm material, such as netflix, so frustrated in fact they stopped using netflix and found other services that arent digitally damaged. Amazing story right?
Nothing amazing about it, and I don't see who you'd think there's nothing special about that, and this is one of the reasons why I expect the Mir vs Wayland debate to mean nothing: Ordinary users don't care. The people who complain about Canonical are a tiny subset of users for whom it violates some kind of philosophical purity.
> Also concerning GTK and Qt, here too the users usually wonder why the app look different, even though I spent some time making them look almost the same. It distracts just a little bit from the Kommon Desktop Environment when GIMP isnt pixel perfect.
These mythical users are very interesting, given that they must be incredibly inexperienced with computers - any user that have used any reasonable number of Windows apps, for example, or used Windows over more than 2-3 years will be used with apps that vary wildly in UI style. Personally, I've never met a user that notices stuff like that. I have met plenty of users that can't tell the difference between IE and Firefox without help to identify which one they're using, or who happily insist they're using MS Word while they're using OO/LibreOffice, without noticing, though.
Users who get distracted by minor details like that will be distracted regardless of environment, and indulging their fantasy of consistency does nothing good for them.
> Now with Mir and Wayland we will just have more of this weirdness, quirkiness and strange bugs.
Yet somehow users have managed just fine with the proliferation of dozens of window managers and other tools. To me this diversity is the strength of open source. Sometimes it causes pain here and there, but it also lets the best win.
> And this is exactly the problem that Mir/Canonical introduce too GNU/Linux. Now we have more bizarre configurations to mess with and avoid.
If you don't like diversity, don't use open source. It's that simple. Nobody has any obligation to try to please you. If it's just Mir you don't like, don't use Ubuntu, or apps written specifically for Mir. It's that simple.
Yet despite your experience, Ubuntu has grown to be by far the most widespread Linux desktop, despite tiny resources compared to several of their competitors. Clearly someone likes it, despite your attempt to imply it's all just marketing, which is frankly insulting. Canonical does not have even a tiny fraction of the money they'd have needed to win the kind of userbase they have just off of marketing.
> and marketing is a too strong force to see through. Canonical I believe has invested as much in marketing as in usability and testing.
Maybe. But for my part I'd been using Redhat and Fedora for a decade and managed to avoid noticing any marketing for Ubuntu - I ended up trying it because I use Debian for a lot of server at work, but the Debian desktop experience is horrific. I fully expected wiping it, or at least getting rid of Unity in favour of a tiling WM or something. Instead it took about an hour of use to decide to make it my new main distro.
> You dont hear about them or them, because they are not on hacker news or reddit to discuss the latest Linus and Mir vs Wayland debate. Just happy users, who get frustrated when they have to boot into windows due to their wish to consume drm material, such as netflix, so frustrated in fact they stopped using netflix and found other services that arent digitally damaged. Amazing story right?
Nothing amazing about it, and I don't see who you'd think there's nothing special about that, and this is one of the reasons why I expect the Mir vs Wayland debate to mean nothing: Ordinary users don't care. The people who complain about Canonical are a tiny subset of users for whom it violates some kind of philosophical purity.
> Also concerning GTK and Qt, here too the users usually wonder why the app look different, even though I spent some time making them look almost the same. It distracts just a little bit from the Kommon Desktop Environment when GIMP isnt pixel perfect.
These mythical users are very interesting, given that they must be incredibly inexperienced with computers - any user that have used any reasonable number of Windows apps, for example, or used Windows over more than 2-3 years will be used with apps that vary wildly in UI style. Personally, I've never met a user that notices stuff like that. I have met plenty of users that can't tell the difference between IE and Firefox without help to identify which one they're using, or who happily insist they're using MS Word while they're using OO/LibreOffice, without noticing, though.
Users who get distracted by minor details like that will be distracted regardless of environment, and indulging their fantasy of consistency does nothing good for them.
> Now with Mir and Wayland we will just have more of this weirdness, quirkiness and strange bugs.
Yet somehow users have managed just fine with the proliferation of dozens of window managers and other tools. To me this diversity is the strength of open source. Sometimes it causes pain here and there, but it also lets the best win.
> And this is exactly the problem that Mir/Canonical introduce too GNU/Linux. Now we have more bizarre configurations to mess with and avoid.
If you don't like diversity, don't use open source. It's that simple. Nobody has any obligation to try to please you. If it's just Mir you don't like, don't use Ubuntu, or apps written specifically for Mir. It's that simple.
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Well by killing XMir they've done that. There is a lot of legacy xlib stuff floating around that will now be excluded from the Ubuntu platform.
Mir is just a square wheel like all the other crap I have to uninstall when someone installs Ubuntu.
I'm back on debian myself now.
Mir is just a square wheel like all the other crap I have to uninstall when someone installs Ubuntu.
I'm back on debian myself now.
Last I heard XWayland didn't actually work properly either, and the official position of the Wayland devs was that it was Not Their Problem because it wasn't part of Wayland, they had no interest in fixing it, and anyone who suggested this reflected badly on Wayland was just spreading FUD because it wasn't part of Wayland.
Which, incidentally, is fair enough.
They've not killed XMir, and they've not excluded anything. They've delayed shipping XMir and Mir for the Ubuntu desktop releases until they can sort out some remaining issues.
Given that one of the stated rationales for Mir was the ability to deliver quicker than Wayland, that's a fairly significant decision. Fedora 20 is going to launch with Wayland as a preview, after all.
Ubuntu 13.10 will have Mir as a preview as well, just not enabled by default on the desktop (but, notably, enabled by default on phones)
Which phones?
There are 4 "officially supported" devices being Canonical's priority and then a whole list of other devices that can use the Ubuntu Touch OS: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices
To check on the progress of the 4 priority devices, see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArLs7UPtu-hJdDZ...
Conclusion:
1. You can use Ubuntu Touch on a Galaxy Nexus already today, for the most important features.
2. The Ubuntu Touch launch date was set for the end of this month (october 2013).
To check on the progress of the 4 priority devices, see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArLs7UPtu-hJdDZ...
Conclusion:
1. You can use Ubuntu Touch on a Galaxy Nexus already today, for the most important features.
2. The Ubuntu Touch launch date was set for the end of this month (october 2013).
Excluding it from the desktop for one release is killing it. A big chunk of ubuntu's repository is now broken, resulting in a big "fuck you" from the users (including me) and no more donations...
Even if they ship X and Mir, people will just use X.
Even if they ship X and Mir, people will just use X.
> Excluding it from the desktop for one release is killing it.
No, it is delaying it from being the default on Ubuntu by 6 months.
> A big chunk of ubuntu's repository is now broken
Really? How so? I have not noticed anything broken at all. How exactly is it broken?
> resulting in a big "fuck you" from the users
I really very much doubt most users will even notice, and I also think you severely overestimate how many of those who do notice will care, and how many of those who care who sees Mir as something negative and/or are bothered by the delay.
> Even if they ship X and Mir, people will just use X.
The point is they will eventually ship XMir, Mir and Mir-enabled toolkit versions by default, so everyone that don't take explicit steps to install a plain X server instead will be running Mir whether or not they run all their familiar apps - including X apps - on top of it.
No, it is delaying it from being the default on Ubuntu by 6 months.
> A big chunk of ubuntu's repository is now broken
Really? How so? I have not noticed anything broken at all. How exactly is it broken?
> resulting in a big "fuck you" from the users
I really very much doubt most users will even notice, and I also think you severely overestimate how many of those who do notice will care, and how many of those who care who sees Mir as something negative and/or are bothered by the delay.
> Even if they ship X and Mir, people will just use X.
The point is they will eventually ship XMir, Mir and Mir-enabled toolkit versions by default, so everyone that don't take explicit steps to install a plain X server instead will be running Mir whether or not they run all their familiar apps - including X apps - on top of it.
Please, calm down.
Things are working OK. The world is not ending and Ubuntu repository is working just fine.
Things are working OK. The world is not ending and Ubuntu repository is working just fine.
For now. Watch what happens when Mir ships:
1. Noone will use Mir because xlib apps and non-ported toolkits will fail miserably.
2. It will not get tested properly.
3. Release+1 with XMir will be shipped and Mir will be turned on.
4. All hell will break loose.
If it doesn't happen, I'll cook and eat my laptop.
The only flag waving so far has been "shuttleworth installed it on his dell and it worked ok for a couple of weeks with some problems".
1. Noone will use Mir because xlib apps and non-ported toolkits will fail miserably.
2. It will not get tested properly.
3. Release+1 with XMir will be shipped and Mir will be turned on.
4. All hell will break loose.
If it doesn't happen, I'll cook and eat my laptop.
The only flag waving so far has been "shuttleworth installed it on his dell and it worked ok for a couple of weeks with some problems".
Canonical's target market is mobile devices. I suspect they will be testing a complete mobile stack. As mentioned above in this discussion, there are 4 example phones that already have functioning images.
Shuttleworth probably knows how to keep his Dell working, and will possibly be sticking to LTS releases.
Shuttleworth probably knows how to keep his Dell working, and will possibly be sticking to LTS releases.
It isn't "excluded". Just not enabled by default. I run Xmir on my laptop without any issues. Multi monitor support isn't there yet so my workstation still runs regular Xorg. The difference in user experience between the two is none.
You've misunderstood this decision. They've delayed XMir and Mir. Ubuntu 13.10 will ship with X as its display server, just like all previous versions of Ubuntu.
I don't know much about Wayland, but I know Mir is trying to be very efficient performance and battery life-wise even for smartphones, since it will be based on OpenGL ES 2.0. Can Wayland do the same?
Wayland already does the same. Sailfish OS which is going in production in the end of 2013 in Jolla's handset is using Wayland.
https://sailfishos.org/
https://sailfishos.org/
What about this:
> Other parts of the infrastructure used by Mir originate from Android. These parts include Android’s input stack[11] and Google’s Protocol Buffers.[12] An implementation detail in memory management shared with Android is the use of server-allocated buffers which Canonical employee Christopher Halse Rogers claims to be a requirement for "the ARM world and Android graphics stack"
I think Canonical wanted to be able to easily port Ubuntu to Android devices in the future. Will that be possible with Wayland, too? I think that's a pretty important aspect, because Android is the new "Windows", and there will be a ton of Android devices in the future, and just like Linux adapted to working on Windows machines, they will need to adapt to work on Android devices very well, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software)
> Other parts of the infrastructure used by Mir originate from Android. These parts include Android’s input stack[11] and Google’s Protocol Buffers.[12] An implementation detail in memory management shared with Android is the use of server-allocated buffers which Canonical employee Christopher Halse Rogers claims to be a requirement for "the ARM world and Android graphics stack"
I think Canonical wanted to be able to easily port Ubuntu to Android devices in the future. Will that be possible with Wayland, too? I think that's a pretty important aspect, because Android is the new "Windows", and there will be a ton of Android devices in the future, and just like Linux adapted to working on Windows machines, they will need to adapt to work on Android devices very well, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software)
Mer achitect - Carsten Munk started the libhybris project, to allow using binoic drivers for Android with normal glibc Linux system. Mer is the core used in Sailfish (and Carsten Munk works for Jolla as well).
See:
* http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-an...
* http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-an...
Canonical started using libhybris without even crediting the author first.
See:
* http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-an...
* http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/05/wayland-utilizing-an...
Canonical started using libhybris without even crediting the author first.
I believe that a lot of the Android integration parts they rely on were developed by a dev who was later hired by Sailfish, and who are as noted above, planning on using Wayland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29
I thought that one of the oft-cited benefits of OSS is choice; surely the existence of both Wayland and Mir offers this?
Edit: Re-reading this, it comes of as quite sarcastic, almost patronising. That is not the intent.
Edit: Re-reading this, it comes of as quite sarcastic, almost patronising. That is not the intent.
> Wayland vs. Mir is going to be a massive headache for linux
Not really. You know what other Linux doesn't ship Wayland, Mir, or X?
Android. And the world hasn't exploded.
Not really. You know what other Linux doesn't ship Wayland, Mir, or X?
Android. And the world hasn't exploded.
Notice how few Linux OSS applications have been ported to Android. Where's LibreOffice for android? Inkscape? Blender? Audacity? GIMP? Thunderbird? Filezilla?
Obviously in most of those cases a naive port of the GUI would only be useful for a large tablet with a keyboard and mouse attached. But still, the naive port would be better than nothing.
The near-total lack of direct ports between Linux and Android (except for SDL-based games) should tell you that this does cause a problem.
Obviously in most of those cases a naive port of the GUI would only be useful for a large tablet with a keyboard and mouse attached. But still, the naive port would be better than nothing.
The near-total lack of direct ports between Linux and Android (except for SDL-based games) should tell you that this does cause a problem.
I think you're lumping platforms with kernels, they're not interchangeable terms. "Linux" isn't a platform because no one has defined what "Linux" is supposed to be.
Android and Ubuntu can be platforms because someone can say "An Android app does these things" and then point to an SDK. Ubuntu is doing the same thing.
Anyone can take a Linux kernel and then build whatever userspace they want on top of it. Android existing hasn't hurt Linux, it's the dominant mobile OS and is bringing in hardware manufactures to work on the kernel.
Sure user space apps are different as you point out, but that's what happens when you give people Lego blocks, not everyone is going to use the same blocks.
Android and Ubuntu can be platforms because someone can say "An Android app does these things" and then point to an SDK. Ubuntu is doing the same thing.
Anyone can take a Linux kernel and then build whatever userspace they want on top of it. Android existing hasn't hurt Linux, it's the dominant mobile OS and is bringing in hardware manufactures to work on the kernel.
Sure user space apps are different as you point out, but that's what happens when you give people Lego blocks, not everyone is going to use the same blocks.
This is splitting hairs. The mainstream desktop Linux distros all run a similar stack of technology that provides a running environment for the major desktop OSS projects I listed. They all brand themselves as Linux.
Yes, technically Linux is only the kernel, but being pedantic about it only muddies up the conversation. When somebody says "this computer runs Linux" they mean Gentoo/Fedora/Ubuntu/Whatever.
Everybody knows I meant "mainstream desktop Linux distro software". Correcting that abbreviation adds nothing to the conversation.
Yes, technically Linux is only the kernel, but being pedantic about it only muddies up the conversation. When somebody says "this computer runs Linux" they mean Gentoo/Fedora/Ubuntu/Whatever.
Everybody knows I meant "mainstream desktop Linux distro software". Correcting that abbreviation adds nothing to the conversation.
Yet no one else uses SurfaceFlinger because Google's no-patches and code-dump strategies makes it completely useless to any potential downstream project.
Apples and oranges.
My apologies, I guess I needed to be more specific here: I meant desktop linux users. People who use Ubuntu, Arch, Debian etc.
Clearly it's not going to matter for servers either, or raspberry pi, or routers, or... lots of things.
Clearly it's not going to matter for servers either, or raspberry pi, or routers, or... lots of things.
Good, they aren't going to have a release that is a massive regression (again). I was planning on skipping 13.10 because everything so far said it would have worse performance and more bugs. OTOH it's a bit scary that their release engineering is making big dramatic structural changes in X servers 3-4 weeks before launch. It should be in frozen locked down beta now... The real solution was that XMir never should have been jammed into their release so forceful while obviously so unready in the first place... Still this is better than launching with it anyways, so half marks Canonical. But this is nothing like the rock solid stability you provided in Beta and Alpha last decade.
Why not? It worked for PulseAudio, right? Or how about the upgrade between the last two LTS releases?
I can't understand Canonical's downright eagerness to force broken software out the door just to appease their roadmap and rigid release schedule. It's pushed as the newbie friendly distro but behaves more like Gentoo when it's time to upgrade.
I cringe when I see people installing Ubuntu on to production servers. The track record just does not support that choice.
I can't understand Canonical's downright eagerness to force broken software out the door just to appease their roadmap and rigid release schedule. It's pushed as the newbie friendly distro but behaves more like Gentoo when it's time to upgrade.
I cringe when I see people installing Ubuntu on to production servers. The track record just does not support that choice.
I have zero problem with Canonical taking risks with their non-LTS desktop releases. That's what they've always been for.
If you can't abide the issues you'll run into and don't want to contribute to the bug hunting, stick with the LTS desktop or LTS server, that's what they're for.
This is a free OS, hence "customers" are also beta testers. Getting new features into their customers/testers hands early and in imperfect condition is the best way to push things forward to the next stable LTS. Learn it, live it, love it.
If you can't abide the issues you'll run into and don't want to contribute to the bug hunting, stick with the LTS desktop or LTS server, that's what they're for.
This is a free OS, hence "customers" are also beta testers. Getting new features into their customers/testers hands early and in imperfect condition is the best way to push things forward to the next stable LTS. Learn it, live it, love it.
"I cringe when I see people installing Ubuntu on to production servers. The track record just does not support that choice."
I would appreciate a pointer to the track record. Genuinely interested not provoking here. Ubuntu Server LTS has always had a 5 year support period, so 10.04 supported until April 2015 and 12.04 until April 2017. Seems widely used.
I would appreciate a pointer to the track record. Genuinely interested not provoking here. Ubuntu Server LTS has always had a 5 year support period, so 10.04 supported until April 2015 and 12.04 until April 2017. Seems widely used.
> I cringe when I see people installing Ubuntu on to production servers. The track record just does not support that choice.
Wow seriously? Wikipedia, Dropbox, Hulu, NTT, ATT, HP Cloud (Guest AND Host), Comcast. Netflix is moving it's entire infrastructure to Ubuntu. Hate on linux sound all you want but Ubuntu Server is awesome.
Wow seriously? Wikipedia, Dropbox, Hulu, NTT, ATT, HP Cloud (Guest AND Host), Comcast. Netflix is moving it's entire infrastructure to Ubuntu. Hate on linux sound all you want but Ubuntu Server is awesome.
I'm not sure why you're throwing Gentoo under the bus when its upgrade system is completely different. There is no "time to upgrade" because there are no releases to upgrade to -- you just install new versions of the software you happen to use when they come out and you feel like it. My own experiences with keeping my Gentoo systems up-to-date have been considerably more enjoyable than keeping my Ubuntu systems up-to-date. (I can no longer keep my GUI-reliant Ubuntu systems up-to-date because they're still using 10.04 as I refuse to "upgrade" past Gnome2. So it was bye-bye Ubuntu for me for new installs.)
I agree with jcastro that Ubuntu Server is good, it's easy. It's a popular choice for Amazon ec2 images. It also represents a different mindset in system administration compared to the classic one that went like "Install CentOS version X and keep it for 5 years, sure the software is old as crap even when version X just came out and we hope we can apply security patches without needing a whole new version that depends on something the package manager can't provide, but it's stable!!!" (Just for fun I googled "centos packages old as crap" and this popped up as the first link. http://scalability.org/?p=6270 Notice how it's from two months ago? It's not a new phenomenon either.)
I agree with jcastro that Ubuntu Server is good, it's easy. It's a popular choice for Amazon ec2 images. It also represents a different mindset in system administration compared to the classic one that went like "Install CentOS version X and keep it for 5 years, sure the software is old as crap even when version X just came out and we hope we can apply security patches without needing a whole new version that depends on something the package manager can't provide, but it's stable!!!" (Just for fun I googled "centos packages old as crap" and this popped up as the first link. http://scalability.org/?p=6270 Notice how it's from two months ago? It's not a new phenomenon either.)
"OTOH it's a bit scary that their release engineering is making big dramatic structural changes in X servers 3-4 weeks before launch"
My understanding is that both Mir/xMir and X11 are in there, just X11 is the default now instead of Mir/xMir because latter not ready for prime time.
Have I got that wrong?
My understanding is that both Mir/xMir and X11 are in there, just X11 is the default now instead of Mir/xMir because latter not ready for prime time.
Have I got that wrong?
Everyone thinks replacing X.org is a clear and obvious win until they try and do it.
The only reason to think differently about Wayland is that a plurality of X.org developers seem to be involved.
The only reason to think differently about Wayland is that a plurality of X.org developers seem to be involved.
Does Canonical have any coherent explanation for why they are still pressing on with their own incompatible rewrite of a display server when a perfectly good one was already in development?
My guess is that they're doing it so they can have control over the pace of development and features. I think Shuttleworth got burned by the early-days Gnome Shell debacle--he felt that they had no input on or control over what Gnome Shell was to become, so he went his own way with Unity.
Mir might be his attempt to control the stack in anticipation of getting burned again. After all, supporting Wayland means working in a committee-ish environment, with principal developers not on the payroll and thus not able to be whipped at a certain pace, and without a dictator's say in the direction of the product. What if he wants feature Z included in the next dev cycle to support cool new mobile hardware? With Wayland, he'd have to play politics with the developers and pray. With Mir, he can just order it.
Not to say that I think it's a good decision. In fact I think it's one of the most ruinous decisions for the Linux community that Canonical could have possibly made. Graphics support has been the biggest thorn in Linux's side for years, and dividing the ecosystem at a time when Valve is poised to finally revolutionize things is pretty despicable. But I can see the short-sighted business logic behind it.
Mir might be his attempt to control the stack in anticipation of getting burned again. After all, supporting Wayland means working in a committee-ish environment, with principal developers not on the payroll and thus not able to be whipped at a certain pace, and without a dictator's say in the direction of the product. What if he wants feature Z included in the next dev cycle to support cool new mobile hardware? With Wayland, he'd have to play politics with the developers and pray. With Mir, he can just order it.
Not to say that I think it's a good decision. In fact I think it's one of the most ruinous decisions for the Linux community that Canonical could have possibly made. Graphics support has been the biggest thorn in Linux's side for years, and dividing the ecosystem at a time when Valve is poised to finally revolutionize things is pretty despicable. But I can see the short-sighted business logic behind it.
> I think Shuttleworth got burned by the early-days Gnome Shell debacle--he felt that they had no input on or control over what Gnome Shell was to become, so he went his own way with Unity.
As someone who was there from the beginning, this is false. The hackfest where some of the initial goals of GNOME Shell were planned out in 2008 at Canonical offices. We were wondering why some of the Canonical guys who were listed as RSVPing weren't there... until we went to lunch and saw that they were having their own private meeting. I don't think we'll ever know what was discussed -- perhaps their indicator system.
Canonical employees were participating in the Boston hackfests in 2008 and 2009 and we welcomed their presence; they actually had a lot of good ideas which we integrated. I, personally, never had any issues with Canonical's work and I think all of my coworkers would agree. I'm really not sure where this perceived "us vs. them" animosity came from, but I never felt it personally.
They're still absolutely welcome to contribute back to GNOME if they want to (and, to be fair, some still do).
As someone who was there from the beginning, this is false. The hackfest where some of the initial goals of GNOME Shell were planned out in 2008 at Canonical offices. We were wondering why some of the Canonical guys who were listed as RSVPing weren't there... until we went to lunch and saw that they were having their own private meeting. I don't think we'll ever know what was discussed -- perhaps their indicator system.
Canonical employees were participating in the Boston hackfests in 2008 and 2009 and we welcomed their presence; they actually had a lot of good ideas which we integrated. I, personally, never had any issues with Canonical's work and I think all of my coworkers would agree. I'm really not sure where this perceived "us vs. them" animosity came from, but I never felt it personally.
They're still absolutely welcome to contribute back to GNOME if they want to (and, to be fair, some still do).
I was at the Boston summit in 2010 (for the snowy hackfest mainly) and distinctly remember some unpleasant and very public back and forth between (I believe) Jon William McCann and a Canonical employee who was trying to troll shell and was rightfully called out for their foolishness. I got a _distinct_ feeling of us vs them, but that was in 2010.
> Valve is poised to finally revolutionize things is pretty despicable.
Valve's announcement is only a few days old. Mir precedes it by months.
Valve's announcement is only a few days old. Mir precedes it by months.
> After all, supporting Wayland means working in a committee-ish environment, with principal developers not on the payroll and thus not able to be whipped at a certain pace, and without a dictator's say in the direction of the product.
That's certainly unbiased wording.
That's certainly unbiased wording.
No. They want to have control, and they think they are large enough to get away with it.
They're probably right.
They're probably right.
Canonical's explanation is on this page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec
It's a short, vague explanation that, other than a correction for a significant inaccuracy in the original version (which I think demonstrates a serious lack of research!), has had no update since it was originally published several months ago, despite the almost universal criticism of Canonical's reasoning by the community. I don't think this is particularly coherent.
It is definitely not vague and seems to be very coherent in their description of features that both X and Wayland are lacking. I'm not a Linux dev but their points seem well justified.
They have maintainability across a wide number of devices as a requirement. They have low powered devices with existing, third-party, potentially closed source graphics drivers as a requirement.
I don't know about anyone else here, but every time I set up a new system I have to waste hours getting X11 and the console resolution working right. Sometimes, they never work right. Add to that modern features like display brightness, backlit keyboards, power management, external monitor outputs, and touchscreen input with gesture support and it's unrealistic for X11 to spread to the vast number of new, lower powered devices with less technical users without some serious further work to standardize and normalize handling of differences.
Therefore I am glad, for the nontechnical majority of the world, that someone out there is bothering to try to make a reference open source mechanism for removing these problems so an install doesn't end in crashes with weird kernel boot messages about drm and BIOS upgrades and X configurations and input device drivers... even if I continue to use gentoo myself.
I don't know about anyone else here, but every time I set up a new system I have to waste hours getting X11 and the console resolution working right. Sometimes, they never work right. Add to that modern features like display brightness, backlit keyboards, power management, external monitor outputs, and touchscreen input with gesture support and it's unrealistic for X11 to spread to the vast number of new, lower powered devices with less technical users without some serious further work to standardize and normalize handling of differences.
Therefore I am glad, for the nontechnical majority of the world, that someone out there is bothering to try to make a reference open source mechanism for removing these problems so an install doesn't end in crashes with weird kernel boot messages about drm and BIOS upgrades and X configurations and input device drivers... even if I continue to use gentoo myself.
Hence Wayland, but Canonical, for some reason, want to be the only people not to use it.
Oh. Maybe I gave them too much credit.
However, our evaluation of the protocol definition revealed that
the Wayland protocol does not meet our requirements. First
more extensible input event handling that takes future developments
like 3D input devices (e.g. Leap Motion) into account
we'd rather avoid having any sort of shell behavior defined in the
client facing protocol.
They've basically just said; 'we don't want to use it'.
Fine.
...but that 'Why Not Wayland / Weston?' section, with its ludicrously obvious 'we corrected this criticism that we previously had up here, woops' is just painful to read.
They gave two ways in which Wayland didn't meet their requirements. And your objection to those reasons is...well, I'm not really sure. You just quoted them and aimed for sarcasm as though they were obviously wrong.
If you're wondering what "coherent" means, it's kind of the opposite of your post. Are you saying that their reasons are incorrect? Are you saying you don't understand them? What?
If you're wondering what "coherent" means, it's kind of the opposite of your post. Are you saying that their reasons are incorrect? Are you saying you don't understand them? What?
I'm saying, a couple of lame excuses* is not a good reason for going their own way.
I'm sure you could come up with 2 good reasons for going with wayland too, if you tried for more than 5 seconds. Does that means it's a good idea?
If they want to explain why they don't want to use wayland they have a couple of choices:
1) Say, 'we don't want to use it', and not give a reason.
2) Say, 'we can't use it, because of...'
I totally respect both of those positions, but the road they've taken doesn't impress me at all.
Both of the (2) reasons they give seem trivial and over coming them, would be, effort wise, surely significantly less than implementing an entire display server.
Can you see then, why their argument doesn't exactly make sense?
If you have some serious and significant concerns with a project, then list them! Don't pull out a couple of random lame* things that you don't particularly like and then say those are why you've decided to devote a huge amount of effort towards something.
*yes, lame. Are they seriously suggesting you can't use a leap with wayland? ..and that justifies, as a policy decision, a reason to go forward with mir? Absurd.
I'm sure you could come up with 2 good reasons for going with wayland too, if you tried for more than 5 seconds. Does that means it's a good idea?
If they want to explain why they don't want to use wayland they have a couple of choices:
1) Say, 'we don't want to use it', and not give a reason.
2) Say, 'we can't use it, because of...'
I totally respect both of those positions, but the road they've taken doesn't impress me at all.
Both of the (2) reasons they give seem trivial and over coming them, would be, effort wise, surely significantly less than implementing an entire display server.
Can you see then, why their argument doesn't exactly make sense?
If you have some serious and significant concerns with a project, then list them! Don't pull out a couple of random lame* things that you don't particularly like and then say those are why you've decided to devote a huge amount of effort towards something.
*yes, lame. Are they seriously suggesting you can't use a leap with wayland? ..and that justifies, as a policy decision, a reason to go forward with mir? Absurd.
Those reasons aren't good enough reasons to split the community. They're reasons to negotiate and to help improve Wayland.
There is no split in the community. You (and I) are perfectly free to use Wayland or Mir, or neither, or both. They can "steal" ideas from each other. The same developer can work on both at the same time.
Competing projects are a good thing. Forks are a good thing.
Competing projects are a good thing. Forks are a good thing.
Perhaps the ability to re-license for commercial use?
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html
> They can relicense Mir (and any other GPLv3 projects they own) under licenses
> that keep their hardware partners happy, and they can ship in the phone market[deleted]
But I'm confused now!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/ubuntu_1310_to_ship_... said the following three months ago:
> Shuttleworth said he has been running Mir on his own laptop, an "all-Intel" Dell XPS, for two weeks, and that barring a few minor glitches, the system feels smoother than it did before.
Surely it must have been ready to ship in a major release of the most popular Linux distribution given that!
There were only minor glitches and it's run a whole two weeks on the damn founder's personal laptop! How could it have been declared not ready to ship three months, such a vast period of time, later!
/s
Please grow up, Canonical. Also, Wayland.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/ubuntu_1310_to_ship_... said the following three months ago:
> Shuttleworth said he has been running Mir on his own laptop, an "all-Intel" Dell XPS, for two weeks, and that barring a few minor glitches, the system feels smoother than it did before.
Surely it must have been ready to ship in a major release of the most popular Linux distribution given that!
There were only minor glitches and it's run a whole two weeks on the damn founder's personal laptop! How could it have been declared not ready to ship three months, such a vast period of time, later!
/s
Please grow up, Canonical. Also, Wayland.
The main problem area blocking the release is multi-monitor support. A regression there means it will break for some users, even though those who don't use this feature might have a huge improvement (such as mark did).
I still hope at some point Canonical will come to their senses and will dump Mir for Wayland. Otherwise this mess will only increase in the future.
A related question. What will SteamOS use after X.org? Wayland or Mir?
A related question. What will SteamOS use after X.org? Wayland or Mir?
Excellent question.
But if they really are going to be a healthy contributor to the whole community, then it makes sense for them to pick one and contribute to it. Who knows what's actually going to happen! I don't want to get my hopes up, though. Graphics support sucks in Linux for (presumably) some economic reason - maybe Valve entering the market is just a hedge against Windows locking down their software market and they don't really care about Linux or at least not about the wider community.
But Gaben has said some pretty promising things. Who knows. Very interesting and exciting, isn't it?
But if they really are going to be a healthy contributor to the whole community, then it makes sense for them to pick one and contribute to it. Who knows what's actually going to happen! I don't want to get my hopes up, though. Graphics support sucks in Linux for (presumably) some economic reason - maybe Valve entering the market is just a hedge against Windows locking down their software market and they don't really care about Linux or at least not about the wider community.
But Gaben has said some pretty promising things. Who knows. Very interesting and exciting, isn't it?
A little birdy informed me that SteamOS is based on Ubuntu, they didn't go into more details besides saying it was a dumb choice. I would assume its based on X.org since neither Wayland nor Mir are mature enough.
> it was a dumb choice
On the contrary, I think it's a great choice. Ubuntu has one of the best, if not the best out-of-the-box experience, especially for unexperienced users. It's not a coincidence that it's been adopted by many big cos (Google comes to mind) or administrations. In particular, hardware support will be key to the success of SteamOS and there are only few contenders that compete with the friendliness of Ubuntu (especially a Valve-customized one).
Isn't that mainly related to the UI and the packages installed by default (I haven't used ubuntu in like 5 years, but back then it felt just like debian with more stuff installed by default).
If Valve makes a complete custom environment for steam OS built around big picture will they really benefit more from using ubuntu versus debian, fedora or any other distro?
If Valve makes a complete custom environment for steam OS built around big picture will they really benefit more from using ubuntu versus debian, fedora or any other distro?
>Ubuntu has one of the best, if not the best out-of-the-box experience, especially for unexperienced users.
Does anyone _not_ expect Valve to throw that all away in favor of big picture mode? Unity, if it does ship in Steam OS by default, will be the under-the-hood interface.
Does anyone _not_ expect Valve to throw that all away in favor of big picture mode? Unity, if it does ship in Steam OS by default, will be the under-the-hood interface.
They will most likely use a much more light weight WM underneath (say Openbox) instead of Unity. If you don't have a WM handling some things and just start steam in BP mode your cursor stays around :P
My high-level impression (based on a small amount of experience) is that if you want to ship a modified distro, it's easier to base your work on Debian than to based it on Ubuntu. The Debian project puts a lot of effort into making a wide variety of configurations work well. Ubuntu focuses on a single configuration, more or less, and they don't seem to mind if that introduces bugs in other configurations.
I personally switched from Ubuntu back to Debian when I realized that I was dealing with Ubuntu-specific bugs more often than I was benefiting from Ubuntu-specific features.
I personally switched from Ubuntu back to Debian when I realized that I was dealing with Ubuntu-specific bugs more often than I was benefiting from Ubuntu-specific features.
Yeah, I think Debian would of been a better choice. Personally I would say Gentoo, but that might be more work for them (although Chromebook switched from Ubuntu based to Gentoo based)
You would get the same hardware support from Debian or pretty much any other distro. If they had strict control over the hardware I would say roll their own kernel, but they don't, so a distro like Ubuntu makes sense. But I don't think the price of dealing with working with Ubuntu would be worth it over using something like Debian. Also, Google was using an Ubuntu based distro for Chromebooks, but they have since switched to Gentoo due to problems of working with Ubuntu.
I think it makes a ton of sense. Steam targeted Ubuntu from the beginning.
But even if they are working with Ubuntu for some of the reasons you mentioned, that doesn't mean that they have to go with Mir. You could install Mir for any distribution. You could install Wayland on any distribution. You could just keep going with X because at least it's stable and people know about it.
But even if they are working with Ubuntu for some of the reasons you mentioned, that doesn't mean that they have to go with Mir. You could install Mir for any distribution. You could install Wayland on any distribution. You could just keep going with X because at least it's stable and people know about it.
They should have stuck with Wayland. Gnome 3.10 supports Wayland, and Fedora 20 will ship with Wayland as an option. openSUSE 13.1 will also ship with Gnome 3.10, so getting Wayland working there shouldn't be hard, and I'm sure the Arch and Gentoo communities will have it working very soon too.
As a GNOME developer, there's still a lot of work to do. It's mentioned as a tech preview for a reason. We'll work on shipping with full Wayland support by 3.12, but don't expect it to be fully usable or represent the final state of Wayland support.
GNOME 3.10 doesn't completely support Wayland, yet. Parts of the software stack do, so you can run Weston in a window and then run individual GTK+3 apps with the Wayland backend and they'll probably work, but actual end-to-end Wayland is aimed at a later date. It is getting close, though :)
People say competition is a good thing, which I agree with. Competition is arguably the lynchpin of capitalism that keeps us from a slew of monopolies in each market.
It appears however that personal vendettas trump that sentiment based on the posts here.
It appears however that personal vendettas trump that sentiment based on the posts here.
Canonical is desperate to differentiate and this make money. However, when all the code is open and free, there is no way to differentiate for the better. It's like selling insurance. Everyone's product is the same.
A new display server does not differentiate an OS in anyway that would remotely make money. It is more likely they tried to use a technical solution to solve a non-technical problem (display server consensus on an old architecture).
Assuming they make money on phones, it is. They can say "Look, mobile app development is just desktop app development! No special environments! Just cross-compile the Exact Same Code(tm)!" or maybe "It's Just Javascript!(tm)" and all of a sudden they've got a ready-made ecosystem of app developers who don't even need to install any new tools other than what they've already got installed on their desktops to provide content for their phones. More content -> more sales -> more money, and they must be absolutely desperate for anything that might draw developers' attention away from iOS and Android. If you start from the viewpoint that you need to provide a phone-specific display server anyway, you can see the thinking.
There are bits I think are wrong with this plan, but it's coherent.
There are bits I think are wrong with this plan, but it's coherent.
A new display server under GPL3 with mandatory CLA would be an excellent way of making money if you got enough leverage that you could start charging hardware vendors if they wanted a private copy so they could avoid disclosing their driver modifications.
It's same relicensing model MySQL made money with.
It's same relicensing model MySQL made money with.
Except no one is shopping around for a display server. Lots of people were (and still are) shopping around for a DB.
[deleted]
I wonder if this has anything to do with Intel's decision to stop supporting Mir. Might've set them back just enough so they won't be ready to ship it on time for 13.10.
Your question is answered in the Q&A page linked from the email:
Has the recent revert from Intel triggered this decision?
A: No. It is completely unrelated. This decision was made by our engineering management team and was based solely on the current quality feature set we defined for XMir, independent of any discussions with Intel.
Has the recent revert from Intel triggered this decision?
A: No. It is completely unrelated. This decision was made by our engineering management team and was based solely on the current quality feature set we defined for XMir, independent of any discussions with Intel.
Does anyone know which graphics cards Mir is intended to support on release?