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Comment by researcher11 | Hacker News Reader

FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

HEADLINE: Dump Mir!!!!!

DESCRIPTION: I know Canonical has put a lot of effort into Mir and at this stage it is probably "too big to fail". But for various reasons my bet is that it will fail. I think this is Canonical repeating Microsoft's Metro mistake. I have a $12K dollar desktop and I don't want an OS optimized for phones !!! I will be able to avoid it but I would rather your engineering effort was better placed.

ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Engineer / Data Scientist

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They really ought to be using Wayland. There are technical reasons for Mir vs X11, but not really any for Mir vs. Wayland other than NIH.

I think most people are unaware of Mir vs Wayland and the issues that Ubuntu using Mir will cause. I only know about it because I was thinking about building a tiling window manager (because I'm weird like that).

I think there is a good chance that Mir will be technically inferior to Wayland and a better chance that Ubuntu UI designers will reinvent the user experience from a phone perspective.

Ok, I'll bite, how do you spend 12,000$ on a desktop? Just keep throwing videocards at it?

Pretty much. It's probably worth $6K at replacement cost today. It's for deep learning and I included what I spent on it and I've refreshed the 4 GPUs once. The current config is probably still good for a couple of years. Now if I need more GPUs I'll just get a second box. The irony is that I graphics power coming out of my ears yet I spend most of my time in vim and tmux.

Just out of curiosity - are the GPUs really the best bet for you at that point? I believe you can buy dedicated FPGA cards, some of which support OpenCL workloads even which might offer you better performance - though they might cost a shitpile too.

Not OP just honestly curious, of the $12k how much is dedicated to Canonical (donation/others)?

I don't like the direction they're going and I'm certain giving them more money won't change it.

It's in the ~$100Ks. I usually pay people directly to build things I think the world needs and then have them give it away.

I'm not here to brag and I'd like to stay anonymous so I'm going retire this HN account now.

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