Mir – Ubuntu's new display server
fridge.ubuntu.com
fridge.ubuntu.com
Canonical are turning into a 1990's style Unix vendor. We haven't forgotten that crock of shit yet.
Ahahaha. That's great.
I was coming here to post the same thing as a question... Because I feel like they're on a mission to replace all the core components for the look and feel.
Is this a stated mission? Have they replaced anything else "major" other than the window manager?
Of course, if it turns into something designed to takes away my freedoms, then I have to worry.
One of the great freedoms of open source software is to go "fuck you disty, I'm off to another one". When all your stuff is coded against Mir, Upstart and Unity, you no longer have that luxury.
Also, beauty is only skin deep.
For example, the *BSD's have a completely different init system and dependency chain resulting in a large "WTF" moment now that everything suddenly has crap loads of dbus in it as a core dependency.
Oh no. Enabling compositing in metacity lets my accu die one hole hour earlier (about 30% earlier). In the age of mobile you please stop assuming "There is enough GPU/CPU power anyway"? Yes there is, but it consumes electricity.
On the other hand I'm looking forward to a x11 replacement. A display server in the spirit of x11 with lots of features thrown out. Fonts are rendered in the program anyway today. And less network round-trips. And allow me the change the output server or even just the display of a running program.
Yes please! Especially the lean bit. Saves all those older laptops and PCs filling up the landfill. Do I really need something more powerful than a Cray 1 to run a noddy spreadsheet or an R script?
"Tightly integrated with the Unity shell, fulfilling the shell’s requirements while at the same time not dictating any sort of semantics up the stack."
Does that mean that Linux graphical applications will 'just work' on the Unity/MIR platform?
"we wanted to decouple the way the shell works on top of the display server from the application-facing protocol"
That sounds like what I was asking above. E.g. LibreOffice will 'just work'
"We are in active conversations with GPU vendors to enable Mir on those drivers/GPUs, too"
oh-oh; nvidia not on board so back to Debian from the one after Wheezy...
It will be fun to watch... possibly on the sidelines if they don't sort nvidia drivers
In the mean time: * MacOSX used a Unix kernel but they didn't use a line of X11 * Android is based on Linux but again, no X.
Ubuntu is the first distro with a clear plan to actually get rid of that crap. And now people are bashing them? What do you think they should do, start discussing with Debian, Fedora and the others about the best think to do? But people have been talking about getting rid of X for years already!
Here is how it works: 1. Get shit done 2. If other people find it useful/interesting, they'll use it and maybe work with you to improve it.
Never try to do 2. before 1. in Open Source, it doesn't work.
THAT is something I'd love to see someone work on. Switching between KDE/GNOME is frustrating because there is so insanely much duplicated between the two with slightly different feature sets.
Mir, meh. I'm guessing it has most to do with being able to target existing Android devices. Most of the design rationale applies to Wayland as well, (including the things they seem to mark against Wayland, strangely)