Canonical's Mir display server

[codedivine]

Apparently Ubuntu will be switching to a homegrown display server called Mir. Thoughts? They cite problems with both X and Wayland. Wayland developer responses appear to be that a) Canonical devs appear to not understand Wayland correctly b) None of the "problems" cited by Canonical were ever discussed with Wayland developers.

I am not sure where Ubuntu is trying to go with all this. They are attempting to reinvent a lot of things, but I am not sure if they have the requisite developer resources to do so in-house. They are already alienating a lot of the typical Linux dev folks (eg: Wayland developers, GNOME devs, KDE devs) so not sure they will get a lot of outside help either. They appear to be focusing a lot on mobile, but they are also not promising anything too exciting for end users that is not already serviced by existing options. By the time they finish their plumbing, the market leaders in the mobile OS space would have evolved as well.

Does this affect your decision of which distro to run on a desktop system? I for one am switching some of my machines to OpenSuse with KDE, though the more critical workstations will remain on Kubuntu 12.04 for now. On mobile side, I am mostly paying attention to Android, and amongst the underdogs BB10 is the only one I am liking (and currently use a Z10).

Do you think Canonical will succeed? Do you agree or disagree with their direction?

[just brew it!]

There's an awful lot of infrastructure built up around X that they are not going to be able to duplicate any time soon. This sounds like a recipe for a train wreck to me.

[cheesyking]

They do seem to be biting off an awful lot to chew on recently. The only reason I think they might be able to pull it off is that despite all the time they're spending talking about projects like this 13.04 desktop looks like it's going to be very good... already more stable than 12.10 or even 12.04. Presumably this is the result of the automated test system they're using these days.

Anyway I suppose it's really all in the hands of AMD and Nvidia as I doubt they're going to do drivers for more than one Linux display server... 3.2.1. cue RMS going nuclear

What really does depress me is the number of times the word "beautiful" appears in the spec, this makes it sound like the marketing department has a hand in writing software specs which can't be a good thing

[Flatland_Spider]

We'll have to wait and see how this pans out. Stuff gets re-invented all the time (Wayland, Gnome, LXDE, Lighttpd, etc.), and this could be worse or better.

This is about Canonical finding a display manager that work across all of their form factors. That way they have a consistent environment for applications to run on across all devices. Part of the promise of Ubuntu mobile is to run the same applications on everything, and they can't do that now while they are running Xorg and whatever is on the phones and tablets.

This doesn't affect my choice of distro. I normally run Fedora or Scientific Linux with some CrunchBang and Mint (Cinnamon) sprinkled in.

If this solves some technical deficiencies and creates a better Linux desktop experience, then I'm for it. Everyone bashes on X, but no one has really stepped up. Canonical has a vested interest in creating a nice Linux desktop experience while no other vendor does. Red Hat focuses on servers, and Xorg works great for that. RH does not focus on desktops or laptops, so they don't have a lot of incentive to push changes. GTK3 and Gnome are RH's babies, but they're low on the priority list.

There's an awful lot of infrastructure built up around X that they are not going to be able to duplicate any time soon. This sounds like a recipe for a train wreck to me.

The rumors are they are going to fork the Android display manager.

They could also import Wayland's X11 layer, which would take care of current desktop applications.

Presumably this is the result of the automated test system they're using these days.

What really does depress me is the number of times the word "beautiful" appears in the spec, this makes it sound like the marketing department has a hand in writing software specs which can't be a good thing

So they finally hired some people off of Red Hat's release team to show them how it's done?

Canonical has always been pretty flowery. It's their soft and cuddly nature that's helped them win people over.

[just brew it!]

The rumors are they are going to fork the Android display manager.

Well, at least they're not starting from scratch then. Does the Android DM currently have any driver support for desktop GPUs?

They could also import Wayland's X11 layer, which would take care of current desktop applications.

I have not been following Wayland closely. How mature is their X11 emulation?

[codedivine]

I wonder also how Valve will react to this. AFAIK, they have been putting efforts to work with AMD and Nvidia to get their proprietary X drivers optimized. Well they also work with Intel, but my understanding is that Mir can reuse the existing Intel open-source drivers so Intel should not be an issue. Open-source radeon drivers also supposedly work with Mir.

Valve has also been advertizing Ubuntu as their officially supported Linux distro. Given Mir + proposed rolling release brings potential chaos in the Ubuntu world, I wonder what position Valve will take. If Valve does get behind Mir, and works with Canonical to get AMD, Nvidia and Intel to write and optimize drivers for Mir, then they might succeed.

[just brew it!]

I wonder also how Valve will react to this. AFAIK, they have been putting efforts to work with AMD and Nvidia to get their proprietary X drivers optimized. Well they also work with Intel, but my understanding is that Mir can reuse the existing Intel open-source drivers so Intel should not be an issue. Open-source radeon drivers also supposedly work with Mir.

The key difference between Intel and AMD is that the Open Source Radeon drivers are still behind the curve when it comes to supporting newer GPUs. If Mir is not compatible with the AMD binary driver then Ubuntu will likely be unable to properly take advantage of latest gen (and probably even one gen back) AMD GPUs.