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Comment by fingerprinter | Hacker News Reader

You are literally the first comment in the entire thread and you have nothing to offer but to chide Canonical, who by the way, were not even mentioned in the article. Neither was Ubuntu. In fact, you have to go about 4-5 threads deep in the comments to see a mention of Ubuntu or Canonical (specifically).

This article is about Wayland. Do you have any thoughts on Wayland? Weston? The future? X, even? Maybe some specific question about Mir and how it relates to thing things Wayland wants to do as well? The advantages of one vs the other? No? You don't have anything constructive to add? Greeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaat.

It's times like these I wish I could downvote a comment more than once.

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Given that the Mir discussion was on the front page some hours ago, this comment does have something _constructive_ to add.

There is literally _nothing_ constructive about the comment. Related to recent news? Yes. Topical? Sure. Snitty? Yup. Constructive? Nope.

Who said comments need to be constructive? We don't have to be working towards a better future every single second of the day, you know.

Welcome to HackerNews. Please read this: http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

"The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: both civil and substantial."

Tell fingerprinter this about being civil.

Yes, that's great, but that's got nothing to do with being constructive. Constructive comments are great, but someone could publish a long and interesting comment criticizing wayland or X11 without suggesting ways to improve. As long as the points are cogent, then the comment should make for worthy material. At no point do such criticisms have to make suggestions on how to improve wayland or X11. Just that they are civil, and substantial. Like you said.

Or maybe you're agreeing with me? It seems strange to redirect me to the newbie guide then.

I took constructive as in constructive to the conversation, not to the person in general.

The definition of constructive is to serve a purpose, whether negative or positive it doesn't matter.

I hope you're happy when you watch a superior open source project stagnate before it had a chance to grow.

What make one project superior to the other, besides your opinion? Open source is darwinian. If one project proves its superiority, development will shift and other projects will change. I would think that, as a hacker community, we could accept that.

First, I mean superior to X, not other hypothetical versions of wayland.

I am worried that the manpower will be divided and that minor decisions now will fuck up cross communal efforts. That's a reasonable belief.

It is a reasonable belief. And I'm not criticizing you for having it. Still, this process has repeated itself for a long time. Its not always fast and the best doesn't always win, but its how things seem to work.

It's not /exactly/ darwinian when one project is being driven by an organization with clout and corporate partnerships. If you're Nvidia/AMD/Intel, which project would you be more receptive toward throwing your weight behind? The rinky-dinky band of Linux hackers with good intentions, or Canonical?

What the manufacturers decide to do is critical, and I promise you they aren't taking some kind of meritocratic open-source approach to evaluating where to place their resources.

The most likely outcome is the Canonical toils away themselves on Mir, and everyone else works on Wayland/Weston. Maybe at some point Canonical decides that it's better to just use Wayland, but that's about it.

Wayland is already at 1.0, and has support from Valve, Nvidia, and AMD behind it. I don't see it disappearing soon. Especially since the implementation of Mir isn't even usable yet (while Wayland is).

Wayland has support from NVidia and AMD behind it? That's news to me. Last time I heard NVidia announced that they will never support KMS.

I agree with ginko, is there some supporting evidence you have that points to support from NVIDIA?

If so, that's a pretty interesting development.

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EDIT: Thanks for the update ElliotH!

Sadly, it seems neither Nvidia or AMD have specific plans for this:

Nvidia http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE5M...

AMD http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE2N...

A great pity.

Ok, I may have misread something, but I was going off of this[1], which was posted elsewhere. I could have sworn that a comment from one of the Wayland devs claimed that Nvidia, AMD, Valve were on-board (at least tentatively) with Wayland, but I can't find that post now.

[1] https://plus.google.com/100409717163242445476/posts/jDq6BAgd...

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