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Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)Posted Mar 4, 2013 22:25 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)Parent article: Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)
Judging by repository history, Mir development seems to have been happening for several months in private and before Wayland protocol was deemed stable. If Canonical had different requirements, wouldn't it have been feasible to talk to Wayland developers and participate in it rather than come up with their own thing? Drivers are going to be a hassle as well.
Also, Unity is moving to become entirely Qt/QML based after a checkered history of changes. Unity 2D was only recently abandoned although it was written in Qt in favor of 3D which was Compiz based (which in turn required a lot of work to stabilize). Again, it seems Canonical would have benefited from talking to KDE folks a long time back since they claim to have the goal of a unified stack across devices which was aligned well with the KDE path.
In either case, these are very ambitious projects and I hope Canonical understands the development and maintenance burden of going solo on this.
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Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) Posted Mar 4, 2013 22:58 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> In either case, these are very ambitious projects and I hope Canonical understands the development and maintenance burden of going solo on this.
I guess they should know better than anyone what it's like to go alone for maintenance and development since the seem to pick this option over collaboration most of the time.
It's like the old adage, Fast, Cheap or Quality, pick any two. They only have a small number of talented developers compared to the competition (Apple, Google, MS) so they are doing this on the cheap and trying to ship by the end of year is very fast so we can guess what is going to be left behind, although I'm not sure what else they could do if they want to be competitive.
Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) Posted Mar 5, 2013 2:47 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link] I'm not sure what else they could do if they want to be competitive.I apologize in advance for the partial quote but this is the only bit relevant to my reply and it stands on it's own as a complete statement. How can they be competitive if they are spending all their development resources on reinventing the wheel? Wouldn't it have been better to help Wayland get there quicker? And by putting their resources into Wayland they would have far more input into how Wayland develops. I can't help but think whoever is making these decisions over at Canonical has no long term thinking. Taking over development of the GUI on a shoestring budget and resources seems to be the height of stupidity.
Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) Posted Mar 5, 2013 3:24 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
> How can they be competitive if they are spending all their development resources on reinventing the wheel
Short answer is that they cant. Their problem is that they want to work quickly without taking the time to build consensus or integrate with existing teams but unlike android they don't have the focus or resources to see it through. I'd love to see an Ubuntu phone that converts to a desktop ui when traditional input/output devices are connected, because I think thats a good idea, but I don't see how they are going to get there behind windows phone, blackberry, webOS, FirefoxOS, etc.
Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) Posted Mar 5, 2013 5:17 UTC (Tue) by swetland (subscriber, #63414) [Link]
Is using an existing abstraction layer for hardware composition that's deployed to a wide variety of SoCs on hundreds of millions of devices "reinventing the wheel?".
They probably could save more time by slicing things *above* the SurfaceFlinger instead of below it, just bolting whatever IPC protocol they want on top if they don't want to use the existing Binder stuff.
Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) Posted Mar 5, 2013 15:49 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Fair point but they are still dividing things in the infrastructure, which seems like unnecessary wheel re-invention, rather than competing in the application space, which would be competition.
Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) Posted Mar 6, 2013 6:12 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
Well they are re-inventing surfaceflinger as much as they are re-inventing wayland.
I agree they would have saved time by implementing their fancy swiping ui as a new android launcher app. But of course that way they couldn't have claimed they are somehow making a "real Linux" phone...
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