Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) [LWN.net]

Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)

Posted Mar 5, 2013 2:47 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953)
In reply to: Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) by raven667
Parent article: Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)

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.

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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...