> 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.