Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir
wiki.ubuntu.com
wiki.ubuntu.com
Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption. But I would much rather know GNU/Linux, not Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu is standing alone with Compiz, Unity, Upstart, Launchpad, and Mir, all pretty fundamental pieces of the core system. In a decade, will switching from Ubuntu to Debian be as big of a culture shock as switching from Windows to Linux?
Exactly. Standards exist in the GNU/Linux world for reason. Mir, Unity, etc. all don't seem to play too well with other distros and are very tightly integrated with Ubuntu; if this continues Ubuntu might turn into a slightly more open OS X, which isn't good at all.
For 2012 Google submitted roughly twice as much code to Webkit as Apple (which came second), apart from them we have smaller yet notable contributors like RIM and Nokia (7% and 5% respectively).
Seriously?
They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC, which will probably have a net harmful effect on the free software culture.
Definitely and only? How did you determine this?
Another technical need they had was for a compiler system that could be easily and tightly integrated with other tools, such as IDEs and debuggers.
Either of the above would have required extensive modifications to GCC, and they would not have been able to get those modifications into the upstream. The result would be Apple would have to maintain a fork of GCC. They'd be spending a lot of effort porting things from upstream into their fork.
Mind explaining how funding the development of free software hurts free software?
Why would Apple be so allergic to GPL unless they want the ability to close stuff? If really you think Apple would stay open if they dominated the market look at the iPhone.
Your metric is essentially "no knowledge is lost from the Free world." However, this means that all free software developers could die tomorrow and your metric would be satisfied.
A better metric is "the most free software that could be made is made." Switching from a GPLd compiler platform to a non-copyleft "freemium" Apple platform is worse for this.
If you don't care about free software as a political goal, there is no purpose to have this discussion in the first place, as you don't care about free software being hurt.
Yes, we'd all like to maximize the amount of F/OSS software in the world. F/OSS is a Good Thing, and I founded a company based around F/OSS for a reason. But it's not this horrible tragedy / affront to humanity, if Apple (or whoever) takes a step away from a purist "Free" software position.
To put it another way: no one owes you (or me, or anybody else) a world full of all the Free software we want. And even more so when plenty of people in the world don't care about software freedom. As long as those of us who do care have the option to fork and continue development of projects, then the actual freedom remains, as far as I'm concerned.
That is exactly my point. You proposed a metric for the health of the free software culture: "Nothing that is free now is non-free in the future." This is a bad metric because if you eliminate all free software development, it reports "everything is okay."
It seems to me that you're turning something analog into something binary. "Nothing that is free now is non-free in the future" is true, relative to any particular project, and is - as a worst case - not so horrible. But applying that to "free software culture" in general, as a comparison to the idea of ALL free software development stopping, doesn't sound reasonable to me. It's like you're suggesting that, say, Apple, moving away from GPL'd "Free" software towards BSD software (and possibly a "free core" model) automatically implies that everybody else does too. But that's just as likely to happen as your hypothetical of every Free software developer dying tomorrow.
OK, but "harmed" is a broad term. I'm harmed if I stub my toe, but I'm also "harmed" if I fall of a bridge and land on my head and crack 4 vertebrae. But there's a big difference between those things.
And anyway, my point was (at least partly) that the growth doesn't necessarily stop because of - for example - the Apple deal (or something like it) because people can always fork. And if the last GPL'd version of something that goes closed is popular enough, it gets forked. See: Nessus[1] / OpenVAS[2].
It means that someone creating a program, proprietary or open source, can, with little effort run that program on most linux distros. We have quite a handful of internal GUI tools, some use Qt, some use GTK, written in python and some in C or C++. The GUI stack makes up the biggest stack here, but they use a few other libs as well, e.g. cURL, openssl, gsl.
All these are readily available, and we run these on various versions of RHEL, Debian , Ubuntu and FreeBSD beacuse of the defacto "standards" provided by these environments. Even porting these (at least some of them) to windows, where many of these libraries are available would take too much time because of minute details - there's other real problems we need to focus on. We hope we still can run these programs on Ubuntu in the future though, but it will not take that much to make it infeasible
Yes Ubuntu is straying from the pack, but I'd rather have them stray and the rest follow when they find something good then have the entire linux community sit in the same place they have been for years. Regardless of what path Ubuntu takes, I think it will be good for the linux community to have that diversity.
Like how Ubuntu is/was based off Debian but going its own direction? ;)
RH is doing similar stuff, although they're more deeply involved, and while I don't especially like how they impose some of their technology, at least it's generally well though out.
RHEL 6.4 still uses systemv init, in fact.
[1]: https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enter...
Have you used Gnome 3? Familiar and dated are not words I would use to describe it. The Gnome team is clearly focused on user experience and without rendering judgment as to whether or not they've succeeded (disclosure: I think they largely have), it's immediately obvious to new users of Gnome 3 (see Torvalds for the canonical case) that the product is not clinging tightly to familiar design patterns.
And what about the BSDs? They certainly doesn't play well with Linux, or vice versa, but that's hardly an argument for calling either an agent for closedness.
In what way is Ubuntu closed?
OSX is hardly open at all. Only a few pieces are (important pieces, but still). Something completely open is more than slightly more open than OSX.
On the other hand, adhering to standards that are years old isn't a great way to advance. Standards have to grow and adapt and, wait for it, change.
That reason being that they grew out organically. And the landscape isn't even unified as it is! Mist distros come with Gnome, but you can run KDE if you are a bit more leet, or if you want something more lightweight you have xfce. Unless...
I'm happy Ubuntu is showing some vision for what their OS can become and work towards that goal.
I believe this is the kick in the pants my team at work needs to evaluate moving to Debian deployments instead of Ubuntu.
I think there is room for Canonical with a slick tablet OS and Debian/RHEL clones/The Others (Arch/Slack &c) as 'traditional' OS
Starting clean you can take all the knowledge gained from previous open projects and create something fresh that is more lightweight, faster and easier to maintain. But will this new components live up to it expectations? Only time will tell, and Canonical is willing to back that venture.
I also believe one need to stop calling linux, linux or the lesser adopted but more correct term for me GNU/Linux. Call the operating system you use by its distribution name, that is the actual ecosystem you using. Which yes, is part of a greater Open Source, Free Software ecosystem.
But to achieve inovation one needs to boundaries, and at the moment Ubuntu is the OS on the desktop with most commercial and adoptions success.
My 0.02c.
1) Make the GNU/Linux stuff work on Android. That's what Tizen does, AFAIK. It's a lot of work. Advantage: everything works with it, and it's well understood.
2) Glue stuff up to work with whatever Android does. That's what they're aiming for. Advantage: less work.
I don't see it as good if Google can lead FOSS desktop development around by a leash.
Why should another company then spend resources to do that work.
I don't understand what you mean with your second statement. But that might just be because I'm dead tired. But I can not stop myself from reading and typing!!1
Because it's GPL licensed. That's it.
Google has spent a lot of time and work ripping out perfectly good pieces of code that are GPL licensed and replacing it with (sometimes inferior) BSD or Apache licensed pieces. At some point, the only piece of GPL code will be the Linux kernel.
When Google ported Chrome to GoogleTV, which runs Android, they ported glibc, too. Apparently, it was easier for them to port glibc to Android than port Chrome to more limited bionic.
* The input event handling partly recreates the X semantics and is thus likely to expose similar problems to the ones we described in the introductory section.
* The shell integration parts of the protocol are considered privileged from our perspective and we'd rather avoid having any sort of shell behavior defined in the protocol.
[1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec#Why_Not_Wayland_.2BAC8_Westo...
Possible scenario:
Nvidia wait for broader Wayland adoption to release their driver for Wayland. Comes along Canonical and drops Mir on our heads. Nvidia scratch their heads and say - forget Wayland. Not sure if they'll say forget Mir as well - they have better things to do than to deal with this mess, but all this doesn't sound good already.
Consider games development. People wait for better drivers (Wayland)? They aren't coming. Should they say forget this mess (Linux)? Or Canonical think they should refocus all driver development on Mir like Android did on mobile creating a horrible fragmentation again?
I like your scenario because I believe a interesting element is that Valve is trying to port most of its Steam games to Ubuntu and they do have muscle with Nvidia and AMD. And with the rumours that the steambox called Piston would be based on Ubuntu.
So in my opinion it looks bad for distro's not using mir and good for distro's using mir. If that is a good thing altogether is another debate.
And as mentioned above profesional game development to Ubuntu is coming at a rapid pace. Maybe at the price of another horrible fragmentation as you call it.
Ubuntu is already quite isolationist. This will only make matters worse.
I agree with the notion, but we still need to see if it will play out that way. For now its only on the table, with a lot of other cards we are not even aware of.
Competition for drivers can start (if they won't be compatible), look at Android targeted hardware and see how sick it is now (it's SurfaceFlinger only, try getting Wayland drivers and good luck with that). We don't need the same story repeated with Mir.
I understand all the concerns about how it will impact the global community; But isn't it generally seen that competition is good, and who's resources is it spreading or fragmenting?
* A distribution who tries to cater to everyone? * Other companies employees who now need to understand and support technology it doesn't want to use? * "Linux" users in double quotes because they want to be able to administrate all their different boxes with different distro's using the same old tools of 20 years ago? * FOSS coders who spend their free time fixing bugs and adding features to projects they like and use?
Call me ignorent and please point out why. But I don't see any of the above as resource issues. The only problem is the "Linux" users and I feel if they start to see themselves as distro's users instead of a name given to a Kernel and Foundation, that problem will sort it self out.
By your account it seems like it already started and Ubuntu might be able to bring in a second or third option.
By the looks of it the greater community wanted Ubuntu to rather spend time in bending tools to do what it needs to do, to benefit the community. Without realising Ubuntu is a product of a company that has goals and can not always take the long road of community inputs, but at least it tries do be open as much as it can.
Which gets criticized a lot because it is a leader in a "linux" environment it mostly created from scratch.
Canonical draws its success on the community (Debian and others). With that, being selfish and isolationist, while at the same time claiming to be "the Linux" is not considered respectful. I personally avoid Canonical/Ubuntu because of that.
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec#Mir_on_the_Free_Graphics_Dri...
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec#Mir_on_HW_Supported_By_Close...
we are in contact with GPU vendors and are working closely together with them to support Mir and to distill a reusable and unified EGL-centric driver model that further eases display server development in general and keeps cross-platform use-cases in mind.
I hope the later means Wayland compatible drivers, because if not - it's going to be bad.
When they say "cross-platform use-cases", I think it means they want to make it easy to build the Mir driver and Android driver from the same source tree - and quite possibly the Windows and OS X driver too. So hopefully they will have some quite general interfaces.
I think the ideal scenario is that the driver interface they define has a very general interface, and then there's a wrapper that turns that interface into an Android driver, another that turns it into a Wayland driver, another that turns it into an OS X driver, and so on. But I don't know if graphics drivers would accept the performance penalty of even a very thin wrapper.
Here is what Wayland / X.org / Mesa developers have to say on this:
The end user Linux desktop market has never really been on their radar, perhaps that will change somewhat with the advent of Steam, but really I expect that unless the aforementioned markets adopt Wayland or Mir (with the latter being most unlikely imo) then NVidia and AMD won't target them with proprietary driver support.
[1] https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts/jDq6BAgd...
I remember fonts being really screwed up for a long time. Longer that it should have been. Just getting anti-aliased fonts was major deal.
Then graphics drivers are a mess. I blame manufacturers of devices here. But still treating it as a black box I just see that is inferior. I know Linus flipped of NVidia but at the same time is a chicken and egg problem. Why should they bother to improve their drivers? To make GNOME 2 desktops look shinier? You criticized Compiz, ok, what is the alternative?
Google did pretty much the same with Android. We have surfaceflinger, dalvik, custom IPC mechanisms. Now they are trying to slowly merge some of them in.
> Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption.
That is what I think. Here is a company that tried to push and everyone resisted and said "you must adhere to standards defined by a 20 year old plus graphical server". I think that is silly. Let them innovate. I for one, am excited for them.
Choice is good!
That has the potential to be a really easy choice for desktop users, but a couple years ago it wasn't very smooth at all.
If Canonical were good at it, everybody would be saying "yeah, go for it!"
But they're not.
Every time they strike out on their own, they seem to end up producing overly complex, badly performing, messes, with tons of issues, that everybody hates. bzr, unity, ...
The only reason people use any of their stuff is because ubuntu pushes it on their users, and people with little experience end up using it by default. Sound familiar...?
[Worse, with Mir, they seem to going for the lockin effect: "mir will integrate especially well with unity"... >< ]
That perception, that Canonical is not competing on fair terms—almost anything they come up with, no matter how awful, will come with a built-in user base—is one of the big reasons they get so much flack for this sort of thing. If it were just some guy in his garage hacking on his new display server after lunch every day (like, you know, Wayland...), and gaining users the hard way, by being better, then nobody would blink an eye.
For that reason, I think people expect more maturity from an influential company like Canonical. They expect them to play nicely and work with others (e.g., if they think they've identified issues with wayland, work to fix wayland; or cooperate in designing a next-generation replacement) instead of striking out boldly on their own every 15 minutes.
Again, if they had proven really good at it, they'd get a pass to some degree—but they haven't. Instead, by making technical merit less of a factor in determining what becomes widely used, they're effectively reducing the overall quality of FOSS. Can you blame people for being annoyed?
I've used Unity since it was released, never had any issues, and generally think it's the best GNU/Linux window shell around.
Bazaar is also ridiculously simple, and I've started using it as a front-end to every other vcs. The support for git is a little rough, but I can do in one command what git users have to do in four, so I deal with it.
I think that the vocal minority of Ubuntu power-users (which is sort of a laughable term) hates change. This is what made Unity such a "failure" when really it's a pretty great system.
That said, I don't really think Canonical is "forcing" anyone besides playing the "defaults" card in the distribution they control, and even then you can simply not use the stuff is installed by default (although I think that making the desktop dependent of some applications that I may not want to use is a little bit against the bazaar philosophy of Linux distributions).
[1] http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-b...
EDIT: formatting
> making the desktop dependent of some applications that I may not want to use
Examples please.
AFAIK the official Lanuchpad FAQ says Bazaar is the best VCS for the project:
https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+faq/37
And apparently they can (or want to) support only one. Fair enough.
I'm curious to know what you can do in one command in bazaar that you need 4 in git to do.
1. Plug in dual monitor to HDMI port. 2. Use Unity.
What did your colleague have trouble with?
(Four might have been slight hyperbole, but git is a usability nightmare. I forget what exact task I can do in one command that it takes 3-4 to do in git, there's probably some set of absurd arguments to do it in fewer, but I don't know them and am not willing to spend hours reading tutorials to discover what magic buttons I have to press to get git to do what I want.)
I remember him trying to move a window to the other monitor and having bounce back repeatedly. Very funny to watch.
> git is a usability nightmare.
No argument here. The design of the commandline UI is terrible ("git checkout" is the first offender you're likely to meet). However, it's powerful enough that I'm using all the time, occasionally bridging with SVN when needed. Once you get hooked on cheap local branching, you can never give up.
Window management can be funny -- I think there's a bug in compiz where a display will "reject" windows if they're too large (when minimized) for the display. This causes the drag-to-top motion to hit the display the window is currently on, and so it goes back to the original display. Using control-alt-numpad5 works, as does unmaximizing your windows and making them smaller than your smallest display.
Maybe they are "being better".
I have no doubt that technically Wayland is better than Mir, but for me (as a user who lost interest in configuring Linux back when FVWM95 was considered interesting) I don't care.
I use Ubuntu (including Unity!) because it works. I never, ever want to deal with weird configurations to work around some bug, and for the most part Ubuntu lets me avoid that.
For me, "better" means "it just works". No other distro does that as well as Ubuntu.
(BTW, Unity isn't that bad once you've used it for a while)
At first there was a small learning curve, but I don't remember often thinking "hmm, I wish I had my GNOME 2 environment or my KDE environment back".
Maybe I too got old and spending hours tweaking my GUI settings just stopped being fun. I just want to fire up the machine and get work done.
I have tried Mint on 2 other computers for all the talk about Mint being the next great Distro, I find it to be far less stable than Ubuntu. I have also started only using Ubuntu's LTS releases with a handful of PPAs to get more recent packages. Helps with stability a lot.
From TFA: "Right now, Mir does not run on desktop hardware that requires closed source drivers. However, we are in contact with GPU vendors and are working closely together with them to support Mir and to distill a reusable and unified EGL-centric driver model that further eases display server development in general and keeps cross-platform use-cases in mind." Good luck with that. How many years did it take to get decent AMD drivers for Linux/X11? The catalyst X11 drivers are still currently a mess.
This is huge for ARM; very few vendors bother developing any sort of an OpenGL driver for X11, and drivers for same GPU often not only SoC specific, but sometimes device specific as well.
[1] http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2013/03/04/mir-an-outpost-envisione...
Mir is FOSS too.
I'd rather know Unix, not GNU/Linux or Ubuntu. Maybe Ubuntu diverging a bit from other Linux distributions, and from GNU, will encourage people to write portable code.
It's a little distressing, I agree, but on the other hand, are you ever really "out on your own" when you have a big user base and your code is GPL?
It's always been the case that, in the strictest sense, "Linux" is a kernel, not an Operating System, and each distro is really it's own OS. That they had a lot in common was a fortunate bit of happenstance in a lot of ways. Now, they start to diverge, that may mean more competition, which should lead to faster innovation and even more progress. And as long as everything is F/OSS, the distros that pick a bit of tech that "loses" can always switch to the "winner" later.
I'm not saying that it would be totally pain free, mind you. But I can see how this sort of move might benefit everyone in the long run.
Furthermore it is horrible because Canonical has a history of secrecy and authoritarianism and they absolutely go against the spirit of open source software development.
Additionally, an upstream package has authority only on ONE component. The distro has authority on ALL components. That makes ALL the difference.
Most of them had contributed zero to Linux, so I don't know where this entitlement sense and emotional response comes from.
If you don't like it, go use whatever you want.
Launchpad / Upstart / Unity / Mir
Launchpad is free-software by name only, and Canonical actively discourage you to setup your own instance.
Upstart hasn't been widely adopted outside of Ubuntu, and has been replaced by the technically superior systemd.
Unity has been extremely unpopular from a user-experience point of view, and now we have Mir. So past history isn't filling me with confidence. Their philosophy seems to be "patch first, ask questions later".
I'm amazed how Canonical has the resources to keep branching out so much while producing a distribution every 6 months. I was under the impression they weren't yet making a profit.
Unity is the same way: it is open source. If you don't like it, fork it and fix it. Or use one of the alternatives. This is not Windows or OS X. Vote with your feet and move over to Gnome 3, Xfce, LXDE, or another DE. If enough people do, Canonical will see the effects and stop putting effort into Unity.
IMHO, Linux and its surrounding ecosystem has a long history of everyone trying to pull it into their own direction. Companies are often forced to cooperate when they don't have another choice, but if they did, they would push their own ideas of what the infrastructure should be on everyone else.
For pacman vs nix, well, pacman is extremely simple. Extremely reliable. Nix has some design advantages, but that don't translate all that well in the practical world right now. Maybe in the future.
But I would personally much rather see pacman (and every other distro-locked package distribution format) dropped where everyone adopted debs or rpms.
What I would like the most, though, is that the most logically technically advanced and easy to use package manager win, and everyone just adopt that. I know that pacman makes building package builds insanely easy, compared to debs or rpms.
A couple of points:
- one example does not plenty make
- Nix has a really interesting technical design. However, it trades the ability to patch security holes across your entire system for the ability to install multiple packages side by side and have atomic upgrades.
More importantly (I was lying about the two points), the package manager is tied intimately to the guts of the distro, it's much less shocking than having Ubuntu implement Unity.
Now, we'll see what becomes of Mir. Whatever mindshare Upstart had went straight to systemd as soon as it came out. If Mir is primarily an expression of hubris, I expect it will follow Upstart in obscurity. If Canonical manage to convince enough developers in the community, they may get something going.
I don't see the problem with then using whatever they want, if it provides a good solution, when upstart was developed systemd wasn't even a viable alternative, for me it still is not if stability is what you want and run on a non-desktop system.
Exploring Android internals I much SurfaceFlinger than X in my understanding of its architecture.
Has it? Do you have numbers?
Because I see a small number of people who complain very loudly, and often make sweeping claims about how unpopular it is without any evidence, who always get followed by responses from people (like me) who love it...
As a "Linux idiot" myself, I hear your disapproval of the parent post, but am curious to hear the details that support your opinion (I might be able to learn something from it).
pilgrim689: Why is everybody hating on Canonical for
ditching X11?
sneak: Because they're "Linux idiots" who love X11.
ihsw: They don't love X11, they just hate Canonical.
edit: I accidentally using the wrong verb form.
And if it turns out like either of those, they end up with an inferior barely maintained product that gets pushed to the sidelines once they show it off on a showroom floor.
The linux idiots have one glaring example: PulseAudio
Throw away user experience, system stability, judicious use of CPU for what?
It certainly improves certain details of the user experience, when it works correctly, also usually consuming more CPU than flash player
- How often do you reboot your computer
- What audio softwares you use the most
For me, PA crashes around once a week (and this is with the latest version I tried), or just plain stops working (like muting the sound, garbled sound, etc)
Not to mention the delay that happens while switching songs in mplayer for example. Use ALSA and song switch is instantaneous.
Once every two or three months, when I remember to apply updates.
> - What audio softwares you use the most
Only flash (youtube, primarily. Also youtube's html5 player probably, I haven't paid much attention to that) and mplayer. A few years ago, XMMS2. I used to use an XMMS2 client I wrote for music, now I just use some bash scripts and mplayer; I can't say I've noticed any delay while switching songs with mplayer or XMMS2.
When I play music from my laptop through my raspberry pi connected to my TV with pusleaudio, then I notice an audio delay. That is the only sore spot pulseaudio has ever presented me.
About the delay, try this: mplayer *mp3 (in a directory with mp3 files, of course), then press >. There should be a significant delay in switching songs (like, 0.5s). Make sure mplayer shows it's using the [Pulse] driver
With ALSA this is very fast
There's a good possibility that this is mplayer's fault more than PA's.
I previously had stock Debian on the machine, and everything was working fine. A half day's effort was put into toying with ALSA configs that Pulse was deferring to for whatever driver choices it made. Dozens of help articles or threads where everyone else in the world could proclaim "Thanks, that fixed it for me!" left me with less functionality than I started with.
The only thing Pulse has ever done right for me was was help to record some loopback audio on an otherwise-crippled sound card.
(After a few months of trying to make pulse work I left for FreeBSD, which works beautifully and avoids a lot of linux's change (seemingly) for the sake of change)
I can't understand all the dislike of PulseAudio either. It certainly has a nicer API than /dev/dsp.
I remember OSS and Alsa, and I don't miss either. As far as I can see, it makes Linux audio work like any other computer in this millennium.
I will admit having a lot of a hate for figuring out which audio 'profile' is which...
If you've got the plugs for 7.1 and a normal line in as well as possibly a digital one, they you've probably got 23 choices of profile for your built in audio device. Add in a GPU with HDMI and the NVIDIA driver and you probably get at least another 7+ choices all labeled Nvidia... I find I frequently have to guess multiple times whenever I hook up a TV via HDMI.
But it works quite well if you define works as works without adding on any usability riders.
PulseAudio works wonderfully for me. It allows software mixing, something that's never been possible for me prior to PulseAudio, and it never crashes.
It also gives me a single place to control volume on a per-app basis (pavucontrol). That's not something I had prior to PulseAudio, either.
I can also keep a single desktop session going for months.
I like it. I think it does things right, and they can optimize it more over time. It is better than having a fast audio subsystem that just can't do what I want. Pulse is a kitchen sink that at least covers its bases.
> user experience
you can set up PulseAudio for LAN audio streaming with padevchooser (GUI). Could you do this with ESD? Arts? Tell me about this audio streaming solution with super UX for Linux that you know...
Yes, and? I understand this is a useful feature for some people, but I'm just interested in listening to music and PA does not me allow to do that without frequent crashes and bugs
I don't care about the features of a car if it stops working at random. And yes, this has happened on every distro I tried since PA started being bundled. Every single distro, every single machine I've had only a stable system with PA OFF
But PA is 8 years now.
I don't remember any software being so problematic as PA in the Linux world. Some have more problems, yes, but they usually have a limited deployment.
Yes, pulseaudio has all sorts of awesome esoteric features. You can stream sound transparently from a linux box to a windows one. That's kind of useless if it brings down your computer.
RHEL 6, Fedora 16, Mint 11 (while it was not obsolete), Ubuntu Maverick Meercat (amongst others)
Oh ok, so Fedora users just have to suck it up and having a crashing system? Congratulations, you don't know anything about distros.
Considering that was pretty much the point of it, of course.
The part I liked was that you would start ESD and everything just worked.
You make a sweeping statement which is not true for every system. Looking at what happens playing a Youtube music video, according to htop:
- pulseaudio is using between 0 and 1% CPU
- plugin-container (wrapping Flash) is at 3%
- firefox oscillates between 20 and 40%
Now, my understanding is that, at the time pulseaudio came out, it was using untested functionalities in audio drivers which, for many chipsets, did not actually work and progressively got fixed. There was the same problem with graphics drivers when KDE 4.0 was introduced. Maybe you're out of luck and actually have a defective driver?
I'm not sure I have a bad driver, the last two chipsets I used were Intel (and no weird audio devices), works fine with other sw. Latest distro tested: RHEL 6 and Fedora 16
For me, PA would stay around 5%, 10% sometimes, and even more depending on the task. Not to mention crashing every week (at a random moment)
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=813407
I'm not sure if this could affect the CPU usage. I hear that you can play with the resample setting to lower it, but I haven't had to do that on a 5+ yo desktop.
Edit: to be clearer, HDA does not automatically mean Intel chip. I made that mistake before.
I made a picture for you to clarify:
http://i.imgur.com/ulGCde2.png (not to scale.)
TD;LR Linux is not one thing. Various projects are not mutually exclusive
We have GNU/Linux with a huge array of applications all licensed in such a way as to allow forking and customisation.
We have different groups of users of desktop/laptops; sysadmins; developers; scientific users; people who use administered desktops at work (e.g. French police &c)
We have a smallish and very pushy company in the UK (Canonical) who want to build on GNU/Linux to produce an operating system (Ubuntu) that will work on TVs, phones, tablets, fridges &c. Their target audience won't be developing alternatives to X, and probably won't be writing bash scripts or anything. (That isn't to say that some their users won't be doing those things).
We have a much larger company in the US (Redhat) who provide a stable conservative desktop as a compliment to their commercially supported server OS (RHEL). They part fund a desktop system that has changed radically recently (Gnome).
There is a German based company that make an enterprise desktop OS and server OS and who contribute to the development of a different desktop environment (KDE)
We have a not-for-profit foundation type entity who push out a version of GNU/Linux that can run on a huge range of architectures (Debian)
There is this thing called 'upstream'. Small projects push out all kinds of applications including alternative desktop environments.
So Canonical does its thing, some of the stuff they do may get back into the mainstream GNU/Linux, some may not. Some hardware manufacturer may or may not take up the system. I may be able to dock my phone to a keyboard/mouse/monitor and write documents in LibreOffice and edit podcasts/photos in a couple of years or 5. (bring that on).
The others carry on as they do now. You may have to choose the graphics card more carefully in future but I hope not. I suspect workstation class computers with separate monitor/bases will get more expensive and specialised anyway, and I imagine someone will do a 'high end workstation-OS' just for them.
1) For the past two years or so the community has been led to believe Canonical would be adopting Wayland. After the slow build of anticipation over that, it was dropped out of the blue.
2) Simple distrust of Canonical's homemade projects after the Unity fiasco.
3) Fragmentation of effort to unseat X. The chance of repeating the history of every other display server that was going to "replace X within Y years" becomes that much higher with two competing alternatives marginalizing each other.
If this news had come three years ago I imagine the response would be wildly different.
I've heard a lot of people say they hate Unity.
It's not hard data, but it's anecdotal evidence that there's a substantial set of people that really hate it.
And most people I've heard who have used Unity love it. The only people I hear complaining are typically people who expect the Linux desktop to remain static and unchanging the way it was when they first used it.
Unity might be a fiasco with a small subset of old Linux users, but Unity or something like it will be essential for Canonical to keep attracting new users, who are expecting polish at the level of OS X rather than at the level of the Linux desktop of a decade ago.
Or who are stuck on older hardware (why was 2d retired, again?)...
Or who think it's utterly silly you have to write a INI (.desktop) file to put arbitrary links in the "dock"..
Or who think that the interface wastes a lot of space...
You've went and generalized a lot of people with legitimate complaints about that DE. Kind of like Ubuntu's developers do.
What are the pros of sticking with Linux Mint? Are they performance based?
Personally I find the state of desktop Linux to be fairly close to abysmal at the moment. I'm not sure we're any better off now than we were with Gnome circa 2000 or so.
I had, and still have, high hopes for KDE once Qt went LGPL, and I do run KDE on my personal laptop. It's not bad, but there are some major pieces of software that don't have Qt native versions. sigh
2) Calling unity a fiasco, is like calling it a failure. Which I believe is simply not true.
Yes some people didn't like it and moved on or made their opinions heard on forums etc.
But Canonical has a plan with Unity, and at the end of the day it gives a better user experience to me and hopefully a lot of other Ubuntu users.
3) There is reasons to unseat X and there is reasons not to unseat X. But what to unseat it with lies with the people that have certain problems, and maybe the problems Ubuntu face with mir is differently to the problems wayland and its community face.
I personally would like to see two different tools, then one large tool like X, and if you read the article they explain why they decided on mir instead.
This has gotten singled out so I'd better say that I meant to find a more polite way of saying "shitstorm". It's not a judgement on Unity itself, but I think it's fair to call the reaction at the time a fiasco.
Mark Shuttleworth created that expectation, when he made a blog post saying Unity would be switching to Wayland: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551
I did a quick google for "ubuntu having problems with wayland" and some interesting links got returned regarding developers struggling to get wayland working, so it didn't get dropped suddenly.
It seems that the mir spec is a public statement that after 2 years they are giving up for a alternative, with reasons and a alternative.
With some individuals up in arms with the discusion, but how should Ubuntu have handles it differently, while keeping to a deadline.
I've never worried about window focus failing to work properly until Unity. I've never had terminal windows fail to be refreshed when scrolling text until Unity.
Why do we want the layman to be using Linux? To give Valve more Linux customers or something?
We should let them be. Laymen will invariably be better served by Microsoft or Apple, trying to win them over in some sort of misguided drive to "win" market-share seems foolish. Linux should focus on it's niche, and Microsoft and Apple theirs.
This market-share envy makes no sense to me. Does Artic Cat stare with envy at Ford's userbase and expend effort trying to get suburban parents to drive their kids to school on snowmobiles? That would just be silly.
Wait until the only way to run FF / Chrome / 3-d accelerated video driver / vi / emacs / something else thats "critical" is to switch to Mir. After all its free, all you have to do is abandon everything else. What could go wrong?
Simply don't use it is like telling people to take up a new hobby once theirs has been destroyed. But I don't want to take up a new hobby and I like this one. Sorry, no, someone else has decided to destroy it, so don't complain or try to work around the damage just select a new hobby. Hey, you look like a technical type of person, sorry about the death of free software and all that, but I bet you'd like Ham Radio or maybe advanced model railroading? ...
How does one free software program replacing another constitute the death of free software?
About Chrome or FF that's only depends on the developers who use the product, I doubt that Google will ever target Mir, actually I believe that the GTK+ backend could target Mir and then boom, all GTK+ applications will then run on Mir, including Chrome. If Google ever comes to target a system with their browser this will probably be Chrome OS.
Firefox is another beast, but unless there's a decision to abandon Linux altogether there'll be devs working on it, or on iceweasel, it's Debian cousin, and this will probably run/compile in every Linux (and BSDs?) out there.
About 3D this is a shit area, I believe this move signals that Canonical will try to sell ARM computers in the future, there's a know lack of free drivers for GPUs in the ARM world. To see what I mean you'll only have to search for the Raspberry Pi "open source" GPU drivers debacle to see how things are going. This is not a criticism of Broadcom who has it's trade secrets to protect, but there the situation is far from perfect and always will be.
There's also an ideological angle: many Linux users feel that there's something wrong with a world where only the technically adept can use a free, open source operating system.
I feel like we've been there since... 2007? My last several purchases were made with zero caution or research anyway, maybe I've just been getting lucky.
> many Linux users feel that there's something wrong with a world where only the technically adept can use a free, open source operating system.
That's fine and all, I don't buy into that ideology but it is fine if others do. Perhaps someone should warn these unsuspecting masses that "Linux for your technologically illiterate grandmother" advocates are not as pragmatic as they may claim to be. I feel like these people are dressing Linux up as something that it is not in order to sell it to people who, were it presented honestly, would not pay it a second glance.
On the software side, Steam got ported recently, but there's plenty of other software that we'd like to see. Flash is no longer released for Linux, although for now at least I can still watch iPlayer with the last version of Flash that was released. Hopefully HTML5 will have killed it before much longer.
Of course we shouldn't pretend that Linux is something that it isn't. If it's not good enough, we aim to improve it. But I honestly think that, if non-technical users got something like Ubuntu 12.04 pre-installed on compatible hardware, it would work perfectly well... except for the expectation, both from users and app developers, that everyone has Windows. Which brings me back to the point about market share.
Except the rest of the (consumer) world doesn't value libre as a first-class feature. They want the shiny.
The way we get to bring our values to the world is to be commercially relevant. Because otherwise, hardware vendors don't care about you, ISVs ignore you, app developers target other platforms, and so forth.
Market share isn't the end goal. It's a means to the end.
Meanwhile all of those unskilled users are not without a cost. Free software support infrastructure is not set up to handle that many unskilled users. If Canonical is going to be giving all of those people 3rd party support themselves, that is all well and good, but it seems to me they tend to punt the ball.
In the modern marketplace, you can't choose either/or. It has to be both.
Ubuntu wants to do both and additionally add libre.
The strawman fallacy you inferred from my statement has the additional fallacy of incorrect causality.
People are initially attracted to Ubuntu for a variety of reasons, and we hope to keep them because we are fit for purpose, not for whatever ideological reason or niche feature, and certainly not due to any sort of con job.
Desktop Ubuntu has failed to reach that critical mass of users to be taken seriously by industry (our good friends at Valve notwithstanding), and the only logical place to jumpstart the install base is the mobile world.
The mobile market is brutally competitive. Ubuntu will succeed or fail on its own merits, not because of any dishonest manipulation of innocent users.
Compare community desktop linux distros with community distros of something more oriented towards the masses... say.. Android.
The Debian Project is a well oiled machine, coherent and consistent. Everything has a well defined process. Technically capable users don't have to sort through piles of crap to get work done.
Cyanogenmod on the other hand is an utter shitfest. Standard operating procedure there is wading through clusterfucked forums looking for undocumented unofficial fixes (in prebuild binaries mind, no source) in threads thousands of posts long filled with idiots saying "hurr durr, I dropped my phone in the toilet, now this patch doesn't work". They cannot handle the size of their technologically illiterate community, and everyone attempting to use their software, technical or otherwise, suffers as a result. (This isn't even touching the issue of shittier hardware support than you would ever expect to see with desktop linux...)
If piles of unwashed masses were really what desktop Linux is "missing", then community maintained Android distributions should, far from being a nightmare, be the promised land. This is plainly not the case.
Show me the desktop Linux equivalent of Android, not Cyanogenmod. It doesn't exist - and you can measure that failure with any number of metrics.
If Ubuntu can achieve that type of success and protect the freedom of users with the GPL (instead of the permissive BSD model for hardware makers) then we will have accomplished something in the world.
Show me an Android project, with all of the unskilled users that come with it, that is anywhere near as organized as the Debian Project. Show me that legions of unskilled users have allowed this Android project to achieve hardware compatibility at all comparable to what Debian achieves on the desktop.
Such a project does not exist. I assert that it does not exist in no small part because they have too many unskilled users, and because hardware support does not materialize as soon as you reach some sort of "critical mass" of unskilled users.
Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots. Only corporations that are prepared to completely disregard community involvement are capable of wielding an idiot userbases. Canonical is neither up to that task nor does it even appear to be pretending to be. Why? Probably because the lunatics run the asylum.
implying Firefox and Chrome will rot.
(And frankly, I would argue that Firefox has been rotting for years now, though likely for unrelated reasons.)
Idiot users are toxic; anything that touches them rots.
Wow. The level of arrogance and elitism on display here is breathtaking.
This is why Linux on the desktop is irrelevant. Not the fact that it's incompatible with most mainstream software, not the fact that it's low profile or the fact that most Linux desktops look and function like Windows' retarded younger brother – but because a tiny minority of the otherwise hugely welcoming community set themselves up as some sort of entitled priesthood and actively discourage 'idiot users' from getting involved.
New users, even idiot ones, are good. Yes, they bring problems and stupid questions. Everyone has to start somewhere. But more people involved means more investment and helps challenge entrenched assumptions about how things should work. Making things shinier and more accessible does not equal dumbing things down.
Why shouldn't everyone be able to use an approachable, thoughtfully designed system that 'just works' and yet shares our values of freedom, community and open source?
Except in practice, it almost always seems to. Which is why I don't and can't do any significant development, or work of nearly any kind for that matter, on Android, or an iPad.
That's about picking the right tool for the job, not dumbing down.
It's like complaining that a trowel is a dumbed down shovelling device because it can't make any significant headway with digging a massive trench.
That said, I develop Drupal sites locally on my jailbroken iPad and it's pretty nifty to have access to a full development environment on something that portable.
Projects that rely on community support simply cannot handle the load. It is a failing of community driven open source to be sure, it would be great if it were otherwise, but I simply see absolutely no reason to think it is not reality. Your theory is nice, and it would be nice if it were reality, but it does not fit the data.
I've spoken to many people over the years and looked at why they use Windows rather than Linux. The reasons, in order from most common are:
1. Lack of the applications they need; nearly always Outlook and Excel
2. Familiarity with Windows that they feel they've invested a lot of time in
3. Simply didn't realise there even was an alternative
Out of all the people I've talked to, there have been a grand total of ZERO that have ever given "Had a bad experience with a member of the Linux community" as a reason. None. Ever.
So, I'm more than a little dubious about your claim that this is in fact the main reason. Got any figures to back up that little theory of yours?
Sounds like what you're really saying is "you can come up with any metrics you want, then define that as failure to justify my position". There's really no objective basis for saying "desktop Linux is a failure", especially when there's no objective standard by which we could say "desktop Linux is a success" either.
Like somebody else just said "market share? Who cares?" Market share is a means to an end, not it's own end. Desktop Linux works reasonably well for a certain population of people with a certain set of values. Does anybody expect that desktop Linux should gain Microsoft Windows like ubiquity?
It's an incredibly useful tool, with a lot of very smart engineers contributing awesome stuff to it. It's a development platform second to none and far more capable than any other OS I know of.
Oh did you mean market share? Who cares?
Here's my marketing campaign, sad as it is, its the best possible spin:
"Hey world, I've got something new for you, its incompatible with everything and doesn't work with anything and can't actually do anything you want, but, hey, its new so it must be better and it does a bunch of stuff that nobody outside the dev community cares about. Oh and we "had" to take some stuff away like network transparency which is awesome, err, I mean ignore the man behind the curtain and someday VNC might work, oh and every dev who's finally gotten used to the existing weird design will have to retrain. Other than that trust me its awesome you better switch now. And by switch, I really mean it since it'll be incompatible with everything else ever written." How could anyone not drop their entire legacy installed base of hardware and software and training and switch, I mean its got transparent animated dancing robots which no one can do without, and its got electrolytes that plants crave!
I'm sorry I just can't do any better given bad news.
Yes Ubuntu is based on a FOSS ecosystem but it does not mean it shares the same goals as linux, whatever the goals of linux are.
It means its backed by a company which in my eyes want to bring the wonders of a second unix based operating to the laymen. Only in this one everything is open, and that for me makes sense.
If someone wants to put the time and effort into making something that is great for my grandparents but awful for me then more power to them.
Meanwhile the rest of us can stick to the distros that are suited to our needs. I think this state of affairs is much better than any one operating system ruling. So long as we have binary compatibility among the Linuxen then I'm happy.
And like most businesses they need to make unilateral decisions. The only difference is that Canonical makes these decision public knowledge while it is trying to achieve a hectic roadmap, for business purposes.
Are these people designing a better answer to Wayland because it's really better, or because it always looks easy when you don't intimately understand the problem space? I honestly don't know, but it's a question I'd like answered before I get excited.
The folks who do want desktops, want those desktops to run software like MS Office or Adobe CS. If Linux can't do that, it does not matter how shiny it is.
"Why Not Wayland / Weston?
An obvious clarification first: Wayland is a protocol definition that defines how a client application should talk to a compositor component. It touches areas like surface creation/destruction, graphics buffer allocation/management, input event handling and a rough prototype for the integration of shell components. However, our evaluation of the protocol definition revealed that the Wayland protocol suffers from multiple problems, including:
The input event handling partly recreates the X semantics and is thus likely to expose similar problems to the ones we described in the introductory section. The shell integration parts of the protocol are considered privileged from our perspective and we'd rather avoid having any sort of shell behavior defined in the protocol. However, we still think that Wayland's attempt at standardizing the communication between clients and the display server component is very sensible and useful, but it didn't fit our requirements and we decided to go for the following architecture w.r.t. to protocol-integration:
* A protocol-agnostic inner core that is extremely well-defined, well-tested and portable. * An outer-shell together with a frontend-firewall that allow us to port our display server to arbitrary graphics stacks and bind it to multiple protocols.
In summary, we have not chosen Wayland/Weston as our basis for delivering a next-generation user experience as it does not fulfill our requirements completely. More to this, with our protocol- and platform-agnostic approach, we can make sure that we reach our goal of a consistent and beautiful user experience across platforms and device form factors. However, Wayland support could be added either by providing a Wayland-specific frontend implementation for our display server or by providing a client-side implementation of libwayland that ultimately talks to Mir."
>This will not end well for interoperability, for developers, or for the wider Linux ecosystem. Bad times.
That comment on OMG! Ubuntu! is making me uncomfortable with the consequences this might have for the GNU/Linux ecosystem. I am not sure about how far I can trust that comment, but the Phoronix article[1] explains it better:
>Canonical developers will make to see that applications relying upon Qt/QML, GTK3, XUL, etc will be able to use Mir in an "out of the box" manner. The legacy X support will come from an in-session root-less X Server.
I would, though, like to know more about the consequences for this. First of all, we know that Unity will be much faster, since this thing needs to run on phones too and Unity will actually be a "real thing" instead of just a Window Manager (Compiz) plugin.
>Isn't a point of FOSS that people can all contribute to one major project instead of reinventing the wheel?
That is another comment on OMG! Ubuntu! and I completely agree with it. Sure, freedom of choice is great, but why not use Wayland, really? It was designed from scratch to work for everybody.
[1]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxN...
What matters is the "winner". They will both hit mainstream usage, we will see which one is easier to develop for, and that one will take off. If Mir's claims of fixing input / specialization issues in Wayland comes to fruition, then it will probably win. If Mir hits like Unity, or atrophies like Upstart, then Wayland will probably win.
The problem is his Wayland fails everyone can switch to Mir. If Mir proves weaker, we are stuck with a more fragmented desktop space because Canonical doesn't change their minds on these things.
http://she-devel.com/Linux_Android_Graphics_Stacks.svg
I believe Mir will just be a custom tailored SurfaceFlinger, I just do not understand why Canonical will not use SurfaceFlinger.
EDIT: Maybe because SurfaceFlinger is built with OpenGLES in mind? I don't really know.
If Canonical is serious about attracting mainstream Linux adoption, this is going to have to be addressed from the start.
X has two drawing APIs. One of these is a part of the core X11 protocol, which is ancient, useless, and nobody uses. The other is the XRender extension which provides modern composite operations, among other things such as gradients. This is what Cairo, for example, uses. X also has font drawing APIs.
http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2010/thoughts-and-rambling-on... :
The X11 protocol (without extensions) defines about 120 types of requests: create a window, move a window, etc.
Nowadays, there's at least 25 % of them which are useless: usage of server-side font, or the drawing of squares and polygon, are unused by any modern application or toolkit. All of this is superseded by requests from extensions, like the XRender one.
The handling of multiple monitors displays has totally been screwed up. X11 has been designed to work in Zaphod mode (independent monitors). But Xinerama, and nowadays XRandR have replaced it up: recent X servers (released after ~2007) does not support Zaphod mode anymore, even if it's a core piece of the X11 protocol.
"With respect to shell development (Unity), three major shortcomings of the X stack prevent us from delivering the user experience (f’n’f) we have in mind:
* X shares a lot of system state across process boundaries. This is obviously not a problem in itself but a system-level UI that is meant to provide a beautiful and consistent user experience is likely to require tight control over the overall system state.
* X's input model is complex and allows applications to spoof on input events they do not own. On the one hand, this raises serious security concerns, especially regarding mobile platforms. On the other hand, adjusting and extending X's input model is difficult and supporting features like input event batching and compression, motion event prediction together with associated power-saving strategies or flexible synchronization schemes for aligning input event delivery and rendering operations is (too) complex.
* The compositor hierarchy ends on the session level, and no tight integration into the system from boot time onward is available. For that reason, there is a visible glitch when transitioning the system from a VT-level to the graphical shell level."
(Disclaimer: I had to work with low level X years ago, so I disdain and hate it with passion).
Today almost everything uses OpenGL acceleration that provides a standard way of drawing things on screen , while being fast and unloading and abstracting work from the CPU.
OpenGL is in itself a meritocracy on drawing standards, companies innovate by extensions and what works in the real world is selected into the API, instead of the complex "by committee" of people that know nothing about drawing design of X.
Long story short: the X11 protocol (which Xorg/X is an implementation of) was created in 1980, and was made for drawing stuff like this: http://xawm.sourceforge.net/Xaw.gif
The important distinction between X and any modern display server is that nowadays we separate compositor (that which composites application content into what you see on the display) and toolkit (that which draws text boxes, buttons, progress bars etc.) into two. X was designed to do both these things. This isn't practical for several reasons. So far people have worked around this issue, but many feel it's time to stop working around it (since the X codebase is a complete mess due to this "working around"), and develop something from scratch that does what we want for a modern desktop in 2013.
http://lwn.net/Articles/536862/ http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/mp4/The_real_s...
A lot of work has already went into wayland and in making things work with it (gtk3, qt5, clutter etc). This is truly an ambitious project and I doubt that ubuntu engineers would needlessly want to write all of this from scratch if there weren't legitimate shortcomings in wayland's architecture.
Personally, I'm looking forward to my wayland powered, fedora 20 desktop running the yet to be invented WMonad tiling window compositor.
[1]: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-Mar...
If they screw it up there are plenty distros to choose from.
Ubuntu already has significant investment in Surfaceflinger/Android via its Touch vertical. It has also started migrating to QT/QML for its shell (which work really well on Android). There is a significant opportunity to innovate on UX (like Blackberry Z10), rather than throw away the ecosystem that would come with adopting an Android core.
Yesterday, I couldnt join a GoToMeeting using Ubuntu. But just after, I did it in less than 2 minutes by using an app oumy Android device. That is a huge ecosystem, that I want to use on my desktop (I dont know how the desktop UX for a touch app will work, but I hope it will).
I say that Ubuntu, Google and Valve should sit together and come up with a graphics+sound backend that will work together. And let me play Half Life 3 on my phone and desktop simultaneously !
My apologies! I'm not a native English speaker :( and sometimes I think I am smarter than I am :)
they broke the initscripts so array assembly didn't work correctly - not even the same as the installed man page stated
they had mdadm version 2.x (has significant flaws) for YEARS after mdadm 3.x was accepted into debian - YEARS - even after multiple users making clear what the problem was in bug reports
a user even made a patch and a ppa which fixed things but still they didn't pick up on that for a year + as i recall
and they broke/removed debian's PERFECT support for installation onto md raid
other stuff i've honestly forgotten but i swear there was more
oh! oh! wait, also the STOPPING THE BOOT PROCESS TO WAIT FOR YOU TO PRESS A KEY if a drive needed an fsck!!!!! what the f....
(don't understand why you were downvoted, good question)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/nux/+bug/846444
So Canonical decides to go off the beaten path and create nux. Dozens of Ubuntu users indicate a problem. Indicating at least hundreds of people probably see this problem?
Resolution? Nothing for 10 months. Then "Gee, our nux developers have been at work on a cool new version instead of fixing bugs, why not upgrade to that and try it out".
With Ubuntu upstream libraries from Gnome, freedesktop.org, Debian etc., you have a confluence of people from different distros who can work on bugs that come up. With these Canonical forks, realistically only Canonical employees are going to fix 95% of their forks. But they're too busy working on the next cool thing to fix bugs.
My Ubuntu 12.04 LTS desktop currently has hundreds of zombie lightdm processes running on it. I reboot but they come up again. This is not specifically a Canonical fork problem, but is an annoying bug and I and many Ubuntu users have come across many of these bugs. I can imagine what Ubuntu will look like as it forks more and more functionality, and less and less help for bugs can gain help from Gnome and fd.o.
but then they decided to became inventors. But they don't have strong engineering background and their products were trash.
upstart never provided advanced parallelism and was surpassed by systemd
Top menu and indicators rely on d-bus -- really stupid idea and misuse of technology
they abandon mutter+clutter for closed gl-canvas rendering library + compiz to be used in unity. Now is mutter+clutter far more advanced.
Now they want to change wayland for mir? are they serious? They are not good at inventing things. They will just make linux fragmentation much worst. It's really problematic to make good drivers and gpu companies can't spend money and people on different linux platforms.
ubuntu became from "linux for human beings" to "crappy mac-os like for poor"
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
It is frustrating being open source advocate, if software you use is somewhat inferior to what is available on other platforms, just try to use firefox on ubuntu and compare that to osx or windows. If Ubuntu manage to pull this off, and I think they deserve all our support in that, we will get inspiration for all the open source projects as well as good codebase they can fork and work with. I am not expert in licencing, but anything they accomplish can't be bad for the open source movement.
My 2c.
What do you find wrong with Firefox on Ubuntu exactly? I'm not challenging just interested. I use Win7/IE9 and Ubuntu1204/Firefox 19 most days.
Under every other circumstance, I would prefer linux/ubuntu to any other machine. I was using linux for several years as primary dev machine. At the moment I am on a mac, even though I have both linux and win machines as well.
" things they claim wayland/weston input can't be extended to support:
"... adjusting and extending X's input model is difficult and supporting features like input event batching and compression, motion event prediction together with associated power-saving strategies or flexible synchronization schemes for aligning input event delivery and rendering operations is (too) complex."
is already implemented and working in weston today..."
Part of the success of open source software is that it's highly evolutionary. Good successful projects attract a following and get better. For this to happen, you have to have choice and diversity. There has to be competing flavors, libraries, and distros all vying for market share.
What Ubuntu is doing is great for us all. Providing more alternatives in the Linux ecosystem than just relying on X/Wayland/Whatever.
Ubuntu seems to have their reasons not to want to use Wayland. Maybe Mir is awesome. Then I can move to it. If it's not so awesome then like Unity and Upstart I can ignore it.
Seems to me the enemy here is the old fashioned clunky X server. Good. Two armies fighting the same target at least eliminates that target before they start fighting each other.
Besides, if they both end up having support in all the major toolkits and they both have an X server fallback, then we should be able to meet in the middle somewhere eventually.
This just pushes me over the edge.
I'm rooting for Canonical to do well with this so that I might finally be able to switch to using Ubuntu in order to get a well-supported, well-integrated, targeted-by-most, "Fast and Fluid" Desktop Environment. Up until now I still hide away in a corner with my annoying-to-maintain (but certainly "Fast and Fluid") Openbox environment.
What I do miss from other OSes/environments is that sense of a tighter integration. I spent many years not missing it, having originally gotten into GNU/Linux by cobbling together my own crummy environment in Gentoo (on which Sabayon is based).
It wasn't really until I first tried Windows 7 a few years back that I realized that if I actually wanted to use the latest this-or-that application in a seamless (dare I say enjoyable?) manner I needed to stop clinging to my obscure WMs.
And yet, to this day, I'm actually still clinging.
I don't know if Debian has a similarly friendly desktop distribution, but unless they do, I'll now point people to Linux Mint. Granted... I think this has been a better choice since Unity came into the big picture, not because it's bad, but because it's unfamiliar.
Debian Wheezy (currently testing but which will be the stable release soonish) provides Gnome 3.4 desktop but with the options of xfce4, KDE and lxde. A recent install using defaults onto a low spec netbook was basically easy. See
http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/linux_debian-wheezy-instal...
When Wheezy goes stable there will be live images which can be installed from.
It's great to hear it installs well on netbooks! I'm typing this on an Ubuntu Aspire One, though I always use OpenBox to replace whatever Ubuntu comes with since I'm comfortable with it. Will definitely check out Debian stable as an alternative (which is a bit funny coming from Ubuntu... an alternative to an alternative).
I think anyone that can reinstall Windows with drivers could manage a Debian install provided they check the wifi card (available firmware) and graphics drivers (not Optimus basically) first.
Gnome 3.4 with Gnome Shell is perhaps a bit heavy for an Atom based netbook although I find it usable.
Fedora is now about as stable as Rawhide used to be.
Also, completely opinionated, but after reading some of the SF code in the AOSP, it seems like just as much of a mess as X is implementation wise. It is all over the place.
Now I / we will inevitably have three little not too compatible islands of X, wayland, mir, who knows.
My primary interest as an end user, because the machines "I do stuff on" are multiple huge headless servers and virtual images running on them, is network transparency. As long as a Mir keyboard/mouse/monitor can connect to a "real" system and give my my X when necessary, in a VNC like window or whatever if necessary, I'll be OK.
Connectivity demands go both ways. If my refrigerator ends up running Ubuntu for its user interface, I'd really like to be able to remotely connect to it to mess with it.
I guess you could say that X and Wayland are like IPv4 and IPv6, where we strive for total migration to the new, better protocol, but in the meantime you can have a dual-stack setup with both that works fine. But it's not like anyone is coming in with a competitor to IPv6, so the analogy completely breaks down...
I like the balance Ubuntu strikes between good hardware support, recent packages, proprietary graphics support, and the "it just works" factor.
I just want all of that without the Unity mess. Unity might be good on a cell phone, but it was really crashy and impossible to do any work, because every time I've attempted to use Unity, I couldn't figure out how to do the simplest things with the GUI, and ended up switching within days.
It sounds like the new window manager will only support Unity.
If it's better, Then they have improved the ecosystem, and the developers and users will follow. If it's worse, then we can hope they will switch back, or they will lose users/developers.
The concern is a mixed bag... splitting development on something that may or may not ultimately win.
But mixed bags lead to innovation more than having one true way. Ideas from Mir and Wayland and X can lead to all three of them improving more then if only one or two of them were viable. However the lack of focus may slow individual development.
TL/DR Worst case is still not horrible, so long as Canonical recognizes it.
( I have a wonderful proof for this, unfortunately HN does not allow to write into the margins.)
SAR - We need fast driver development using safe and automatic "Template-Based" build systems. There is a lot GNU/Linux can learn from Embedded Systems development.
As someone who is happy with an X desktop I don't entirely get it. I understand that some of the folks doing Wayland have experience hacking on X but it seems a lot like wheel reinvention. X may have some warts but it's hard to argue that it's totally broken; it's also come a long way in the last 10 years or so, I'd say in testament to its ability to be extended. I think innovation in the toolkits (to catch up with where X is today) sounds like a better deal.
If it is running an X server on top (and Mir says it will, and Wayland can) you can probably still do ssh -X.
"Licences:
GNU GPL v3, GNU LGPL v3, MIT / X / Expat Licence, Other/Open Source
(Boost Software License - Version 1.0)
Commercial subscription expires 2022-09-24
This project’s licence has not been reviewed."Or do they expect gnome to port to mir? Unless they already worked that out it doesn't seem too likely as this amounts to a direct shot at them.
If Ubuntu is suddenly not going to have any gtk applications available it is going to be a very foreign environment to lots of its current users.
Application authors relying on Qt/QML, GTK3, XUL etc. should not be required to perform additional porting as we will work on providing Mir integration for the most prominent toolkit choices.
I'm a bit confused, I thought GTK+ did its rendering through Cairo, which would mean that a Cairo backend is what's needed. Not 100% sure about this though, I don't track GTK+ at a low level these days.
Really?
The code looks quite weak at the first glance, but at least not so ugly as average open-source code.
The architecture solutions seem a bit weak too, even weaker than a GUI engine I have written being a junior developer.
Overall, their code seems to be written by a junior developer.
Seems to be too ambitious so far.
The problem is that it is actually really hard to make a proper GUI engine. It requires enormous experience and amount of expertise, like you can come up with something decent after building a few your own engines and closely analyzing existing solutions.