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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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? 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

These days, I just use Stella (a CentOS remix with multimedia codecs set up). Old versions of packages but very stable.

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.

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.

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).

Even if they ship X and Mir, people will just use X.

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.

Things are working OK. The world is not ending and Ubuntu repository is working just fine.

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".

Shuttleworth probably knows how to keep his Dell working, and will possibly be sticking to LTS releases.

https://sailfishos.org/

> 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)

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybris_%28software%29

Edit: Re-reading this, it comes of as quite sarcastic, almost patronising. That is not the intent.

Not really. You know what other Linux doesn't ship Wayland, Mir, or X?

Android. And the world hasn't exploded.

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.

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.

Clearly it's not going to matter for servers either, or raspberry pi, or routers, or... lots of things.

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.

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 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.)

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 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.

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?

The only reason to think differently about Wayland is that a plurality of X.org developers seem to be involved.

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.

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).

Valve's announcement is only a few days old. Mir precedes it by months.

That's certainly unbiased wording.

They're probably right.

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.

    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.

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 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.

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

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.

A related question. What will SteamOS use after X.org? Wayland or Mir?

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

It appears however that personal vendettas trump that sentiment based on the posts here.

There are bits I think are wrong with this plan, but it's coherent.

It's same relicensing model MySQL made money with.

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.