Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir [LWN.net]

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 13:14 UTC (Thu) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link] (1 responses)

Sounds like good sense to me. Hopefully Canonical won't try and make it hard for them!

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 7:21 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link]

How could they? They don't sponsor Kubuntu!

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 15:27 UTC (Thu) by imgx64 (guest, #78590) [Link] (22 responses)

A very timely announcement for me. I've been thinking about switching from Kubuntu to Fedora KDE spin once F19 is released, mostly because Ubuntu has been increasingly deviating from "standard Linux", and Mir was the last straw.

That said, I'll probably do the switch anyway for systemd.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 16:33 UTC (Thu) by grahame (guest, #5823) [Link] (10 responses)

I'm a bit torn – Ubuntu has nice frequent releases and dpkg/apt plus PPAs, Debian has dpkg/apt but lacks frequent releases, and running testing in production is a pain (plus package pinning is the devil), and Fedora is unfortunately not great in terms of upgrading and dealing with yum.

I wish there was something combining the good elements of the above!

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 16:55 UTC (Thu) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (2 responses)

Why would you want your production to be affected by frequent releases? Debian stable is perfect for it. For the desktop usage Debian testing is just fine, except for long freeze periods. But there was a proposal how to fix that.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 20:10 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]

For the desktop, Debian unstable is pretty solid. I ran it for nearly fifteen years, and had less than half a dozen major problems that entire time. There are official release series of other systems that have had more problems than that. :)

I recently switched to testing when I got a new computer, just to see what it was like. I'm seriously thinking of going back.

The name "unstable" does tend to scare people off, but really, it would be more accurately described as "occasionally-a-little-bumpy". :)

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 11:34 UTC (Fri) by grahame (guest, #5823) [Link]

It depends what you're doing on your server. I mostly install Python / web app dependencies in virtualenv under the user account running them, I tend to want a web and database stack that's up to date, not a couple of years old.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 17:39 UTC (Thu) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

Well there is still openSUSE with its excellent zypper software manager and countless repos on the openSUSE build service at http://software.opensuse.org/search

Releases every 8 months with 18 months of support for a release and good balance between up to date and stable.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 21:34 UTC (Thu) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

I dipped into OpenSuSE for the first time in over a decade late last year and have, in general, been pleasantly surprised how well it works.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 17:43 UTC (Thu) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

FedUp is the recommended method for upgrade since release 17. The reason upgrade using yum is not official supported is due some major change and incompatibility issues.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedUp#How_Can_I_Upgrade_My...

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 18:10 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

What's wrong with Fedora's upgrade mechanisms? FedUp works fine for me, as did PreUpgrade before.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 5:12 UTC (Fri) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

Try Linux Mint - the core (APT, PPAs, etc) is Ubuntu-based, while the GUI is sensible: X-based with MATE as a Gnome 2 continuation or Cinnamon as a Gnome 2 like desktop built on Gnome 3. There are variants for KDE, XFCE, LXDE, etc, and there's also a rolling release version built on Debian (LMDE).

Unlike Ubuntu, the Mint developers seem very focused on listening to their desktop users, not chasing after a potential "big win" in tablets, mobile, etc.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 10:12 UTC (Fri) by gspr (guest, #91542) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm in the same situation. I prefer Debian in almost every way, but Ubuntu gives me one *very* valuable thing: a 6 month release cycle. This lets me run much newer software than Debian stable, yet breakages can only happen at fixed times - release upgrades - and those I can do when I have time to handle breakage. (I also enjoy the free PPA infrastructure, but it's no dealbreaker for me).

Debian is wonderful, but Ubuntu really hits the sweet spot for me as a *non-rolling* distro with a perfect release cycle.

I'm glad I can stay with Kubuntu a while longer, thanks to such reassuring statements and great work by Riddell and the other Kubuntu folks.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:13 UTC (Fri) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

yet breakages can only happen at fixed times - release upgrades

Heh, as if. There's a reason Debian releases come so far apart. The constant hurricane of changes in a 'stable' Ubuntu system is dismaying.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 17:52 UTC (Thu) by whiprush (guest, #23428) [Link] (2 responses)

The only "standard linux" is linus' kernel, and the display manager doesn't really have anything to do with that.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 7:24 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link] (1 responses)

Linux is both the name of the kernel and the distributions that use it.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jul 1, 2013 17:11 UTC (Mon) by clint (subscriber, #7076) [Link]

No, it isn't.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 19:57 UTC (Thu) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (5 responses)

There is no "standard Linux".

There are a bunch of Linux distributions packages stuff similar to Fedora, differs in minor aspects and call themselves "the Linux community", though.

But a straight Google Trends search will show how big these distros are compare to Ubuntu and big-two proprietary OS.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 4:54 UTC (Fri) by imgx64 (guest, #78590) [Link] (4 responses)

Right, and I prefer the "Linux community" over the "Ubuntu community", regardless of their relative size.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 4:34 UTC (Sat) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (3 responses)

This is no "Linux community" either.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 13:50 UTC (Sat) by smartboyhw (guest, #89471) [Link] (2 responses)

That's completely wrong. If there's no Linux community, how does Linux kernel gets it's contributions from people all over the world? And also, albeit many distributions based on the Linux Kernel does exist, we all live in a Linux community. If you think there is no Linux community, think again.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 16:20 UTC (Sat) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (1 responses)

Have you checked: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members

Have you thought about why there is a lawsuit around Linux being called "SCO v. IBM"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._IBM

Have you thought about why Enterprise Linux generally use old kernel with new feature backported rather than new kernel directly?

We can certainly call a bunch of companies with common interest plus some independent contributors a "community", but I guess that may not be the kind of "community" you are referring to.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jul 3, 2013 12:16 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

Community sure doesn't mean army of clones.
You don't need to have the same goal to form a community. You are even allowed to have disagreements...

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 1:29 UTC (Fri) by kevinm (guest, #69913) [Link] (1 responses)

An honest question: Isn't systemd also deviating from "standard Linux"?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 2:51 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Last I checked, systemd required a pretty up-to-date Linux to work fully. Do you mean "standard Linux distribution" instead? If so, sure, I can see it, but at that point aren't GNOME 3, KDE 4, Wayland, Unity, PulseAudio, PolicyKit, etc. all significant deviations from "standard Linux" of their time?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 16:41 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (10 responses)

From the announcement:

> After that we hope to switch to Wayland which is what KDE and every other Linux distro hopes to do.

I seriously doubt that he asked every known Linux distribution project if they planned to switch to Wayland, and that there was a 100-percent unanimous response that they would. Big grain of salt here. I expect to see at least one Mir derivative, perhaps several.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 17:19 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (6 responses)

"big grain of salt"... Yeah... Well let's hope your salt is wasted, because if more than one serious Linux distribution (and let's just disregard the hundreds of outliers at the end of the long tail) adopts Mir instead of Wayland, we'll have an even more serious fragmentation than anything we've seen before.

Fortunately, no serious distribution has announced adopting Mir, and fortunately, Ubuntu is playing Mir so close to their chest that it's unlikely any other serious distribution will want to adopt Mir.

But you're probably right, no doubt someone will create their Ubuntu clone Linux distro that uses Mir, give it a name and get it on Distrowatch, and Ubuntu will tell the world that Mir adaption is 100% up, and you will feel vindicated, since "_Jonathan Riddell was wrong! Mir derivative spotted!"

In practice, let's hope it will stay at that. I'm fairly confident it will.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 19:29 UTC (Thu) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] (3 responses)

Erm, no, that was systemd's modus operandi a few months ago. Do you think Ubuntu will copy it?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 19:37 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

What are your claiming that systemd did here? It is not very clear what you are referring to. Note that systemd is widely adopted by distributions (Arch, Fedora, openSUSE, NixOS etc) that aren't derivatives of each other in any way.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 22:26 UTC (Thu) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] (1 responses)

ah, just the charming practice of claiming adoption by a majority before being adopted by a majority.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 2:58 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Didn't the systemd maintainers have discussions with many distribution representatives before forging too far ahead? I know that some things were chosen to keep the historical Debian way, others Red Hat way, and still others had new ways which were a compromise based on multiple historical isms. I would imagine during these meetings, plans for migration were discussed. Did this happen with Mir? It looks to me that it was handed to us as an idea on a silver platter from Canonical and we should take it as gospel. At least systemd had independent disciples with plans to use it before announcing world domination.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 14:51 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (1 responses)

> But you're probably right, no doubt someone will create their Ubuntu clone Linux distro that uses Mir, give it a name and get it on Distrowatch, and Ubuntu will tell the world that Mir adaption is 100% up,...

There's one more step: I don't think anyone will release a Mir-based Unbuntu derivative without replacing Unity with something else. If Mir's window manager is tightly coupled with the display server (I don't know if it is or not, but I suspect that it is), then that will produce a level of fragmentation not seen with X.

> ...and you will feel vindicated, since "_Jonathan Riddell was wrong! Mir derivative spotted!"

Projection alert!

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:41 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

"Projection alert!"

Not "projection" but rather "prediction".

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 10:04 UTC (Fri) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link] (2 responses)

It is sad to see such a jab from Riddell against the Mir effort.

What we have here is a few vocal people trying to stir the communities against Mir. They could simply do their own stuff and be civil about it.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 11:18 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

KUbuntu _is_ Jonathan Riddell's "own stuff" that he does, sponsored by Blue Systems. And I find him perfectly civil about it, including in the blog post under discussion.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 4:39 UTC (Sat) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

Well, do you know the business model of Blue Systems? I cannot find any information on their website.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 19:40 UTC (Thu) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (77 responses)

Every one has right to hate Canonical/Ubuntu(vanilla)/Mir/...

But those who with such hostile attitude should immediately quit any work of Kubuntu.

If Kubuntu, given its current manpower, tries to deviate from Ubuntu vanilla, it may just end up having a more crappy end user experience.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 20:13 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (43 responses)

Why? Ubuntu is based on Debian, so it's not like they're going to be forced to re-invent the wheels. It's not like Debian is planning to switch to Mir. (At most, they might eventually offer it as an alternative.)

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 20:25 UTC (Thu) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (42 responses)

If one want to follow Debian's path closely then please start a new project that base on Debian.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 20:56 UTC (Thu) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link] (41 responses)

Just assume this would be done: The effect (and I'm not sure you thought this through) for Kubuntu would be that it would be left for dead. No work either towards Mir or Wayland would be done -- because the people who do the work left.
It's the developers' and project leader's right to choose the project direction. You can ask them to take their toys and leave, but I doubt it's going to work out in the way you'd like it to.

If you think Kubuntu should adopt Mir, show up at their project meetings, IRC channel and whatever and start working on making it technically feasible (it's not as it stands). It would, most likely, be a waste of time, but that's *your* prerogative. You might prove us all wrong in the end.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 23:01 UTC (Thu) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (40 responses)

Declaring a project dead is certainly better than shipping craps to end users.

I guess there are several KDE offering distros want to exploit users from Kubuntu desperately.

There is no detailed technical reasons presented so far, just "adopt Mir/XMir is bad, don't adopt Mir/XMir is also bad" whining.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 3:04 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (14 responses)

Canonical have a poor track record of competing with equivalent projects from outside Canonical - see the rate of systemd development compared to upstart development, for instance. There's no compelling technical reason to prefer Mir over Wayland, so why should anyone choose Mir?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:19 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (12 responses)

You have your rights to judge Canonical. But if one have mindset like you, should she work on a project whose name is a trademark of Canonical?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:33 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (9 responses)

Canonical didn't have to pass Kubuntu off to community control, but they did. As a result, there's no obligation at all for it to make the same technical decisions as the other *buntu projects.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:40 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (8 responses)

I wish they use such freedom to redirect kubuntu.org to opensuse.org

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:43 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (7 responses)

You're obviously hostile towards Kubuntu, but you haven't explained why.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 17:33 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (6 responses)

I think Kubuntu has lost its direction and passion reading recent messages from Kubuntu devs.

I'd do a flavour to uninformed end users and let the user who want KDE start with openSUSE.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 17:42 UTC (Fri) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (5 responses)

Honestly I think this is nonsense. I use Kubuntu on several different machines, prefer it to other KDE-based distros, and think the Kubuntu devs are doing a fine job. Perhaps you should stop bad-mouthing Kubuntu in an attempt to bolster your arguments.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:08 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (4 responses)

"I was very fed up with Ubuntu at the time anyway because our bug tracker once again exploded after the Ubuntu release." -- Martin

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:34 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

well, there can be two reasons for that.

1. Ubuntu is doing something wrong that breaks KDE

2. Ubuntu is doing something right and has a lot of KDE users, so when there is a Ubuntu release, a lot of people are seeing the new version of KDE for the first time, and so are seeing the bugs for the first time.

The real question isn't around the number of bugs that are reported after a Ubuntu release, but rather should be "are these bugs in KDE or Ubuntu", if they are in KDE (or Kubuntu elements that aren't Ubuntu elements), then he really should not be getting upset at Ubuntu.

If these are bugs caused by Ubuntu elements, then he may have cause to be grumpy.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:41 UTC (Fri) by mgraesslin (guest, #78959) [Link] (2 responses)

I do not know what this quote adds to the discussion, but I need to point out that I am not a Kubuntu developer and do not work on Kubuntu.

If you don't believe into my claims concerning the bugs: feel free to look into our bugtracker. The information about bugs per distribution is available. Or just look at my two Google+ postings on the topic:
* https://plus.google.com/u/0/115606635748721265446/posts/g...
* https://plus.google.com/u/0/115606635748721265446/posts/G...

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:51 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (1 responses)

I actually choose to trust Martin's claim about Kubuntu's quality here. But I'd like to see concrete evidence (full links) if people claim that it is due to Unity's influence.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 19:07 UTC (Fri) by mgraesslin (guest, #78959) [Link]

> if people claim that it is due to Unity's influence.
I - at least - never claimed that it is due to Unity's influence. I don't know why the stack is that shaky compared to other distributions and I don't care to be honest. All I see is that we have magnitudes more crashes in the Ubuntu (that is below the KDE/Kubuntu layer) stack than in other distributions stacks. There are many reasons for that and I discussed it at length with Kubuntu developers.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:05 UTC (Fri) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link] (1 responses)

With that response, you did a good favour displaying what Canonical is about, a distraction for the Linux Communication pretending to be an entity it never was, Ubuntu. I think it is time Canonical withdraws Ubuntu name because they managed to pervert it and changes to Apple wannabe.

I speak from my personal point of view which does not reflect my organization.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:42 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

I have no connection with Canonical.

Ubuntu cares for end users, not the some vocal but worthless community.

If community work can be seriously trusted, why Red Hat and SUSE never ship Fedora and/or openSUSE to their paid customers?

There are good news about Linux adoption at times, didn't you notice that the distribution used are either "enterprise Linux" or localized fork of popular distro (often Ubuntu)? Have you thought about why?

There are some good communities around. One way to judge is to see whether the community maintained software support Mac OS X or Windows.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 19:20 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

BTW, maybe you are unaware of RMS's unwillingness of abandon Bazaar for Emacs development. (I use Git but I don't find Bazaar worthless.)

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/158242

For systemd VS Upstart, Upstart started earlier and was a quite success. I think Ubuntu 14.10+ should switch to systemd as RHEL7/systemd should be released and well tested by that time. (I'd rather ignore bold claims from community, no matter positive or negative) Ubuntu's current decision of keeping Upstart is up to 14.04, IIRC.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 7:28 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link] (4 responses)

That's incorrect, Just Google a bit and you'll find very compelling reasons to _not_ want to adopt Mir for KDE-based distributions.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 7:30 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link] (3 responses)

And here it is: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/mir-in-kubu...

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:15 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (1 responses)

Don't show me such junk post again.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 19:41 UTC (Fri) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link]

> Don't show me such junk post again.

Please follow your own advice.

*plonk*

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:23 UTC (Fri) by dpquigl (guest, #52852) [Link]

I think you missed the 100 message "discussion that" maxiaojun and other users had in the original LWN post about that article.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 15:36 UTC (Fri) by mgraesslin (guest, #78959) [Link] (19 responses)

> There is no detailed technical reasons presented so far, just "adopt Mir/XMir is bad, don't adopt Mir/XMir is also bad" whining.

Do you accept "it adds another layer to the stack" as a technical reason?

If not we can turn it around: we have also not seen any technical reason why Kubuntu would want to have XMir in their stack. Mir is clearly not an option for neither 13.10 and 14.04 as KDE workspaces had already the feature freeze for 4.11 - which will be used in both 13.10 and 14.04. Given that KDE Workspaces 4.11 will be the last release on this technology stack (Qt4/kdelibs4/XLib only) Kubuntu would not even learn anything from running on the XMir stack for the future. So for 14.10 the technology evaluation will look quite different (X11 only, X11 or Wayland, Wayland only or something with Mir).

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:31 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (7 responses)

No. Adding layer isn't necessarily a bad thing. XMir may end up works better than vanilla Xorg. (I'm aware of the fact XMir currently have a performance hit)

For KDE freeze thing, I think it should be an XMir bug if it has trouble running vanilla KDE stack. Bugs can be found by extensive testing rather than extensive whining.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:41 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (6 responses)

In what ways do you think XMir might end up working better than Xorg?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:52 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (5 responses)

In ways that Mac OS X and Windows are better than current Xorg-based Linux desktop.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:59 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (4 responses)

Have you tried running a full X desktop on top of OS X or Windows? Doing so doesn't inherit any of the benefits you gain from using the native graphical environment. So, how would using XMir give you advantages over using plain Xorg?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 17:06 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (3 responses)

If the native stack is high quality, you still benefit from it.

I remember the days when screen resolution change requires tricky configuration of X and I had no luck with my big LCD monitor.

Today, "xrandr" command is still necessary in some cases.

Installing binary drivers to X based system is also a mess. (I know that the GPU vendors should take some blame. )

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 17:11 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

How do you benefit? If you're speaking to XMir rather than to Mir, the only interfaces you have available are the ones present in Xorg. Can you provide a list of the benefits you expect to see, along with an explanation of why they're present under XMir but not under Xorg?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 17:29 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (1 responses)

Do you think XWayland might have advantages over vanilla Xorg? If not, well, OK, you win, bye.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 17:36 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

I think XWayland would provide exactly the same benefits (or lack thereof) as XMir. You're the one who said they were there.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 17:49 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (10 responses)

Wayland also adds a layer, just like Mir does.

So you can't say that Mir is Absolute Evil because it add another layer while at the same time saying the Wayland is the Best Thing Ever while it does the same thing

The link provided up-thread quite rightly said that at the time there was no code for Mir available, and so they had no way of properly evaluating it. Things have changed since then, code is available, and if it's really going to be shipped as default in 13.10, then it's a lot further along than originally expected, so it may really be time to re-evaluate things.

The arguments that no KDE developers use Kubuntu actually bothers me because that indicates that it really is a second-class citizen in the KDE world as well as in the Ubuntu world.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:08 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (9 responses)

Nobody's talking about XWayland. The choices are native Xorg, native Wayland or XMir. The question is why anyone would prefer XMir over native Xorg.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:28 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (8 responses)

> Nobody's talking about XWayland.

Sure they are, they are very vocal in saying that apps aren't going to have to change because X can run on top of Wayland, so existing apps will keep working.

They may not name it XWayland, but it's effectivly the same thing as XMir. In both cases it's running X on top of the lower level display manager.

As for why anyone would want XMir instead of native Xorg, I would say it would be the same reason for wanting XWayland instead of native Xorg (whatever those reasons are. Personally, I would prefer to stick with native Xorg and be able to ignore both Wayland and Mir)

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:37 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (7 responses)

Sure, as a transition mechanism - it's there to permit legacy applications to continue to run even when your desktop doesn't speak native Wayland. Which isn't analogous to what Canonical are proposing, and as such is completely irrelevant.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 19:25 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (6 responses)

How is it different? it looks the same to me. In both cases they are providing a way for people to run existing apps on their new system.

Many Wayland advocates seem to be hellbent on trying to say that all apps will change to be Wayland only, so that they will no longer work on Xorg, but the Wayland developers seem to be more sane and are saying that the X support will need to be there forever to support apps, and that only some apps will natively support Wayland, and then only through toolkits that support systems other than Wayland.

Other than the "Mir is Evil, how dare they create something to compete with the One True Future of Display", I see no reason why Mir and Wayland are fundamentally different in how they would be supported

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 19:30 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (5 responses)

In one environment, you run your entire desktop on the native display server and run legacy applications via an intermediate X layer. Only a minority of applications have an additional layer between them and the display server. In the other, you run your entire desktop on the intermediate X layer. Every application has an additional layer between them and the display server.

KDE plan to add Wayland support, so KDE on Wayland would fall into the first case. KDE do not plan to add Mir support, so KDE on Mir would fall into the second case. For KDE itself, and for KDE-based applications, using Wayland introduces no additional layer. Using Mir does.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 19:40 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

and if KDE was not planning to support Wayland it would be in the exact same situation as it is with Mir

Other environments who are not rushing to switch to Wayland are going to either be in the exact same situation for both Wayland and Mir, or they are not going to be able to run on Wayland (if it doesn't provide the ability to run the entire environment through X)

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 19:48 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (3 responses)

Yes, but since we're talking about reality rather than some hypothetical, and since we're talking about KDE rather than some other desktop environment, when Martin says "Do you accept 'it adds another layer to the stack' as a technical reason?" he is talking about KDE and when you say "Wayland also adds a layer, just like Mir does" you are, in context, wrong.

If other distributions change to using Wayland as their sole display server (which is, so far, a hypothetical), and if other desktop environments still target X rather than Wayland, then yes, those other desktop environments would be in exactly the same situation. But the current topic is KDE - the subject line ought to be a clue.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 19:51 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

so because KDE decides to boycott Mir, Mir is bad because there is an extra layer involved with displaying data from KDE

seems like a self-fulfilling claim.

If KDE were to support Mir, there would not be any extra overhead when using Mir either.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 20:01 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

If Kubuntu switched to Mir, there would be an additional layer because KDE (an upstream project that Kubuntu does not control) does not (and has no plan to) support native Mir and as a result would be running under XMir.

Again, please read the subject line and take some time to consider the context in which statements are made. Your claim was, in context, entirely wrong.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 20:05 UTC (Fri) by mgraesslin (guest, #78959) [Link]

Let me think: no. If some distribution would say they put KDE on top of XWayland, we would tell them the same.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 12:03 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (32 responses)

Every one has right to hate Canonical/Ubuntu(vanilla)/Mir/...

Indeed. They don't need the permission of some code of conduct to disagree with the way Canonical has repeatedly tried to throw away as much goodwill towards Ubuntu as possible. I wouldn't call that "hate", though, even if your narrative depends on using such terms.

But those who with such hostile attitude should immediately quit any work of Kubuntu.

If anyone were to quit anything, I think you'll find that Canonical "quit" Kubuntu when it was declared that the modest resources dedicated to the project were going to be discontinued.

If Kubuntu, given its current manpower, tries to deviate from Ubuntu vanilla, it may just end up having a more crappy end user experience.

It may be the case that some of the more extreme breakage I've seen in KDE 4 installations have been a consequence of Ubuntu misconfiguration and the Kubuntu people having to fight various technical decisions made in favour of Unity. In which case, Kubuntu would do well to rebase on Debian and enjoy a level playing field.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:49 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (31 responses)

> I think you'll find that Canonical "quit" Kubuntu when it was declared that the modest resources dedicated to the project were going to be discontinued.

Shouldn't the called community proud of its independence?

> It may be the case that some of the more extreme breakage I've seen in KDE 4 installations have been a consequence of Ubuntu misconfiguration and the Kubuntu people having to fight various technical decisions made in favour of Unity.

It may a duplicate of Martin's false claim about Ubuntu's Mesa stack. If you believe it is not the case, please show me full links of relevant information.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:00 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (30 responses)

Shouldn't the called community proud of its independence?

I suppose so, yes, but why ask the question? The only "obligation" that Kubuntu has towards Canonical is in the use of the trademark, but a quick change of name and Riddell and friends don't "owe" Canonical anything at all.

It may a duplicate of Martin's false claim about Ubuntu's Mesa stack. If you believe it is not the case, please show me full links of relevant information.

My claim about breakage is really my own user experience installing the Kubuntu packages on an Ubuntu system. Some of the breakage is just the KDE project's own fault, like the weird panel resizing controls and iPod-style K-menu, but one generally does not have the feeling that the system is allowing KDE to show its best.

Of course, there doesn't have to be anyone at Canonical or Ubuntu deliberately making life hard for Kubuntu developers. Instead, they just need to keep changing stuff and making Ubuntu different from other distributions. That adds work for those developers and means that they miss small details that turn out to be important things, so I found that it was impossible to perform updates via the graphical update tools in KDE, and the solution was to manually install various packages that should have been pulled in by one or more of the many KDE-related packages.

Faced with running even faster just to stay in the same place, the people responsible for delivering KDE on an Ubuntu foundation, otherwise known as the Kubuntu developers, will have to decide which stuff to abandon in order to deliver anything at all. I am just saying that if they switch to Debian, they may gain more than they lose, and the time they no longer have to spend on keeping up with Ubuntu's technology changes can be spent delivering a better user experience and fixing things in KDE that might not be great design choices in the first place.

But anyway, you might be disappointed at their lack of enthusiasm for Ubuntu's new technology choices, but unless you're going to pay them to keep up, I don't see how you can have any expectations of them at all.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:21 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (29 responses)

> a quick change of name and Riddell and friends don't "owe" Canonical anything at all.

Cool, do it.

> Instead, they just need to keep changing stuff and making Ubuntu different from other distributions. That adds work for those developers and means that they miss small details that turn out to be important things, so I found that it was impossible to perform updates via the graphical update tools in KDE, and the solution was to manually install various packages that should have been pulled in by one or more of the many KDE-related packages.

How similar are Arch, CentOS, Debian stable, Fedora, Gentoo and openSUSE? What's special about Ubuntu with regard to KDE? Can you show me concrete evidence.

The quality issue of Kubuntu is due to the fact that both the upstream and downstream don't bother to perform essential testing. They believe that things work in openSUSE should just work in Kubuntu as well. That's absolutely fine. Just that I'd redirect KDE's potential new KDE users to openSUSE when applicable. I don't think any end users should wasting time on some piece of under-tested software, not matter it is libre or not.

> if they switch to Debian, they may gain more than they lose

Again, do it rather than say it.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 23:08 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (28 responses)

Can you show me concrete evidence.

Yes. Although we'd need to ask Mr Riddell himself as to whether the developers were too overworked to have caught this. Either way, I'm not really blaming anyone for anything: it's a fact of life that the more people have you spend time on one thing, the less time you get to spend on other things.

I don't really have anything else to add, here. If it offends you that someone won't add Mir support to an Ubuntu-based KDE distribution, why not do the work or pay for the work yourself? You probably won't get your way otherwise and after a while people will just tune you out, anyway.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 4:17 UTC (Sat) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (27 responses)

> If it offends you that someone won't add Mir support to an Ubuntu-based KDE distribution, why not do the work or pay for the work yourself? You probably won't get your way otherwise and after a while people will just tune you out, anyway.

If the distribution is called Mint KDE or Netrunner, then I cannot care less.

Caring less

Posted Jun 30, 2013 16:10 UTC (Sun) by gmatht (guest, #58961) [Link] (26 responses)

Canonical seems quite happy that Kubuntu is being continued to be supported and have "no issue" with their trademark being used. If Canonical wants to claim that Kubuntu is bringing disrepute to their trademark then fine, but I don't really care if whether you approve of Kubuntu's use of someone else's trademark. Also, Kubuntu is still based on the Ubuntu repositories and much like Lubuntu and Xubuntu can be installed along side Ubuntu with a simple apt-get command. This is more important to me than whether it uses Mir or not.

Caring less

Posted Jul 1, 2013 2:01 UTC (Mon) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (25 responses)

> Also, Kubuntu is still based on the Ubuntu repositories and much like Lubuntu and Xubuntu can be installed along side Ubuntu with a simple apt-get command.

Is it still that simple if vanilla Ubuntu uses XMir or Mir while derivatives don't?

Caring less

Posted Jul 1, 2013 3:18 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (24 responses)

part of this also depends on what hardware you are talking about running on.

There is unfortunately a lot of hardware out there that has good Android drivers, but no good Xorg drivers. If you try to run on hat hardware, you will probably be better off with XMir than with Xorg, even with the extra layer.

Caring less

Posted Jul 1, 2013 4:33 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (23 responses)

XMir doesn't run on top of unmodified Android drivers.

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Posted Jul 1, 2013 6:13 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (22 responses)

are you sure about that? everything I've been reading indicates that they do. What is it you are seeing that makes you think differently?

Caring less

Posted Jul 1, 2013 6:26 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (21 responses)

What have you read that suggests it does?

Caring less

Posted Jul 1, 2013 6:31 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (20 responses)

lots of things, google for mir android drivers and you'll get back a bunch of links.

a couple of the more authoritative ones

http://unity.ubuntu.com/mir/android_technical_details.html

http://kdubois.net/?p=1815

quoting this second one:

> Does mir support android drivers?
>
> Yes! We put great care into our platform abstraction so that when you run on mesa desktop drivers, you use our mesa/gbm platform, but when you run mir inside of an Ubuntu Touch phone/tablet, you use the android platform to get full OpenGLES acceleration.

Caring less

Posted Jul 1, 2013 6:35 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (19 responses)

I didn't ask about Mir. I asked about XMir.

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Posted Jul 1, 2013 6:51 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (18 responses)

since XMir is the X protocol on top of Mir, why would drivers that work with Mir not work with XMir?

Caring less

Posted Jul 1, 2013 15:05 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (17 responses)

An X client connects to XMir. It sends an XDrawRectangle command. How does XMir turn that into a hardware-specific draw command?

Caring less

Posted Jul 1, 2013 21:04 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (15 responses)

I don't know but I would guess EGL or its not hardware accelerated. I would guess that it's not much different than XWayland, XAqua, XWin, etc. any system where X.org isn't directly driving the video hardware is going to have these same constraints.

Caring less

Posted Jul 1, 2013 21:32 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (14 responses)

Which provides no advantage over using X.org. XWayland loads modified X.org drivers to provide hardware acceleration, and my understanding is that XMir behaves in the same way. I've seen no evidence that XMir is able to use Android drivers in any meaningful way.

(The fairly obvious subtext here is that dlang should stop making authoritative statements about things he doesn't understand)

Caring less

Posted Jul 1, 2013 21:40 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (10 responses)

I posted links to the official Ubuntu site and to one of the developers FAQ sites.

Both of them explicitly say that Mir is able to use unmodified Android drivers to provide fully accelerated graphics.

If you are claiming that Mir windows on a Mir system will be accelerated, but XMir cannot use those drivers at all, that would seem to the statement that requires proof. It would seem obvious that if some windows on the screen can use Android drivers, that all the other windows on the screen would be using the same drivers.

Caring less

Posted Jul 1, 2013 22:03 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (9 responses)

Look at the XMir source code. See any references to Mir protocol calls? It creates a Mir window and then renders into it. Mir has *zero* idea what's going on. In that situation, how could Mir accelerate any of the operations?

Bluntly, it would seem obvious that you don't know what you're talking about. Other windows are accelerated because the toolkits rendering into them are able to make mir calls. X clients can't.

Caring less

Posted Jul 2, 2013 11:23 UTC (Tue) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (8 responses)

You said:

>XMir doesn't run on top of unmodified Android drivers.

Then you said:

>It creates a Mir window and then renders into it

>how could Mir accelerate any of the operations?
>Bluntly, it would seem obvious that you don't know what you're talking about

You've just moved the goalposts and then attacked someone for not understanding where you've hidden them.

Caring less

Posted Jul 2, 2013 13:47 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (7 responses)

Yes, I was inaccurate. What I should have said is that XMir (as opposed to Mir) will not make use of unmodified Android drivers. As such there's no advantage in running XMir rather than Mir - dlang's original claim of "There is unfortunately a lot of hardware out there that has good Android drivers, but no good Xorg drivers. If you try to run on hat hardware, you will probably be better off with XMir than with Xorg" was wrong.

But you're right, the way I disagreed with it initially was (strictly) wrong and potentially misleading. I apologise for that.

Caring less

Posted Jul 2, 2013 15:51 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (6 responses)

if Mir runs on a device, why would XMir not run on that same device (since it is just a layer on top of Mir)

since there are devices that have Android drivers but no X.org drivers, this means that XMir will run on some devices that X.org will not.

Other than the "it's not a free enough driver, so you should not use it" argument, how is someone not better off with XMir than Xorg in such a case?

Caring less

Posted Jul 2, 2013 15:55 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (5 responses)

XMir will run on that device. Unaccelerated. X.org will also run on that device. Unaccelerated. How does that result in the user being better off?

Caring less

Posted Jul 2, 2013 16:01 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

In my experience, Xorg does not run on all the embedded devices/tablets/etc that have Android drivers. In some cases it's been a matter of using the Android drivers or no display.

In addition, as others noted, even if Xorg is able to get some display on the device via the framebuffer driver, it can't always handle the modesetting and multiple outputs that the Android driver can.

Having a display beats not having a display.

Caring less

Posted Jul 2, 2013 16:03 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (3 responses)

Do you see any evidence of modesetting interface code in XMir?

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Posted Jul 2, 2013 19:26 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

it doesn't need to be in XMir, it just needs to be in Mir.

since XMir 'just' puts windows on the Mir desktop, any modesetting that Mir does benefits the entire desktop, including any XMir windows.

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Posted Jul 2, 2013 19:44 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm running an X environment on XMir. I want to move the screen on my HDMI output from the left of my internal display to the right of my internal display. How does that happen?

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Posted Jul 3, 2013 8:25 UTC (Wed) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

You change a configuration file for Mir?

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Posted Jul 1, 2013 21:59 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

> Which provides no advantage over using X.org.

Well, if there are Android drivers for a device and there are not X.org drivers for a device, getting a display would seem like at least a minor advantage to me.

If the Mir stack can then take full advantage of acceleration (as indicated by the various links) then there's no reason to expect that XMir would not be able to make use of it.

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Posted Jul 1, 2013 22:06 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

X.org will run on any hardware that provides a framebuffer interface. You'll have zero acceleration, but in the absence of an X.org driver, XMir will also be unaccelerated.

Caring less

Posted Jul 2, 2013 6:10 UTC (Tue) by raof (subscriber, #57409) [Link]

You do still get the advantage of whatever modesetting support the Android driver provides - the framebuffer interface isn't known for its sterling multi-head support.

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Posted Jul 1, 2013 21:20 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

being that I'm not an X developer, I would assume that it works very similar to how X works for anything else. It has both the unaccelerated capability and whatever acceleration the drivers provide, XMir chooses which version to use based on what's available, just like Xorg would with different cards, some of which provide acceleration while others don't.

In either case, you can have the situation where sometimes the back-end provides acceleration, in other cases it doesn't. the X server (be it Xorg or XMir) will receive the same requests from the application and will decide how to render it.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 20:48 UTC (Thu) by jdulaney (subscriber, #83672) [Link] (29 responses)

"Here at Kubuntu we still want to work as part of the community development"

Zinger

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 27, 2013 23:54 UTC (Thu) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (28 responses)

For those who want to be blind followers of some self-appointed upstreams, I guess Ubuntu is probably not their cup of teas.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 0:31 UTC (Fri) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link] (1 responses)

aren't all upstream self appointed?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:37 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

Yes.

"The future of GNOME is pretty clear. The world's premier and, in fact, only truly free software operating system."

https://www.gnome.org/news/2013/03/gnome-3-8-jon-mccann-t...

I guess systemd and/or Wayland proponents probably have similar mindset.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 11:45 UTC (Fri) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] (9 responses)

As opposed to being a blind follower of Canonical, I suppose.

Any direction in this requires making choices. You seem unhappy with the choice the majority are making in not adopting Mir and, as with most people I've seen who are supportive of Mir, do not seem to understand why. This seems to lead to quite a bit of angst, as is evident in the pro-Mir comments here.

The bottom line is that Mir does not solve any problems that Wayland does not already solve (often with more mature code); Mir is used by a minority of 1 distribution who insists on having control of its direction thanks to a CLA and closed in-house development practices; several other groups already have their stack running on Wayland (in case you missed it, KWin devs demo'd Plasma Desktop on the Wayland equivalent of XMir some weeks ago; though they had the wisdom to call it a 'hack' that was not suitable for actual deployment)

So it is should come as little surprise that interest in Mir is not great.

I noticed you've made the assertion in your comments that not electing for Mir means Kubuntu will ship crap to its users. I'd love to hear your fact-based reasoning for that one.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 16:44 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

No. Mir solved the very problem that Wayland proponents don't have a schedule.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 17:45 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (7 responses)

There is a more fundamental problem.

Currently Mir is essentially untestable outside of specific Ubuntu environments without aggressive vendor specific patchsets to both mesa and xorg's xserver. Patchsets not officially submitted for upstream mesa and xorg to consider for inclusion.

Everything about how Mir development is done still tastes like alpha in-house development. Not a project meant to be used widely by external projects.

The inability to spin up xmir capable xorg from xorg upstream development tip is a somewhat serious issue. How is Debian really going to justify pulling in the xmir-enabling xorg patchset into their xorg packages in experimental? It's just not a reasonable expectation for the Mir _upstream_ project to be making concerning Debian's workflow. And if Mir as an _upstream_ project isn't thinking about getting their work into Debian experimental ahead of Mir becoming a default stack tech in Ubuntu..a derivative of Debian...then they've absolutely lost sight of the forest for the trees. The push to make this _default_ is just absolutely crazy. Crazy.

It's one thing to treat the needs of Unity as a special case, because Unity is so tightly tied to Mir's development roadmap and to flip the switch and turn on Mir by default specifically for the Unity environment because Canonical management has committed the resources to make sure they address the Unity stack issues. Unity developers don't do their development work on Debian so they don't need to worry about Mir working on Debian.

Its quite another to turn it on by default for all the other environments..with upstream developers..who can not play with Mir release tarballs on the platform targets they develop on. This is crazy, and its absolutely strategically poor decisioning both politically and technically. Mir's development model borders on being hostile to externals. And forcing it as a default as Ubuntu project strategy without it being testable in Debian binaries at all...is actively hostile to external DE devs and is going to cause serious political blowback across project lines.

You would think at this point Canonical would have a very good sense of evaluting blowback potential ahead of decisions like this..considering they've had wild success at generating blowback it in the past. The lack of empathy for the needs of other projects in the ecosystem..both upstream and downstream developers in the ecosystem relative to Caonical projects continues to amaze me. They just don't seem to think about it at all, ever, until someone shows up and yells at them for being clueless about it.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 18:27 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (6 responses)

Your response is always overly long.

I still yet to see any issue technically unsolvable.

BTW, I guess Debian is not the upstream of many Ubuntu packages these days. And few people, if any, cares Debian on desktop. Debian is stable sounds like an old myth to me.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 3:11 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (5 responses)

If these issues were fundamentally unsolvable I would not be wasting my time trying to explain what external developers need in order to feel comfortable to start evaluating Mir/Xmir as a supported graphics stack in the long term. Every single criticism I have every thrown out concerning Canonical's policies have all been...solvable. And this one is too.

The way forward is to flip the switch to use Mir/Xmir by default for DE upstreams that have affirmed interest in supporting the tech. So right now.. that's just Unity7/Unity8. No other DE installed by users should be defaulting to xmir in 13.10. NONE of them. No other DE has upstream buy-in to work out the issues with the Mir stack. And there will be issues. Furthermore Canonical does not have the manpower to deal with issues across multiple DEs. They need to focus on delivering Unity+Mir and commiting to an agressive SRU policy just for that stack. Focus, focus, focus. Get through one release cycle of real-world usage by real-world users of Mir/Xmir with just Unity and show you can keep up with the bugreports generated from that.

So how do you make sure the Canonical teams can focus? Without overburdening them with bugreports from DEs they are not going to have time to deal with? Make Unity8 default to Mir/Xmir(as a fall back for proprietary drivers), have Unity7 defaults to Xmir and all other DEs in 13.10 use x.org. That's it.

Problem solved and available manpower gets used in a focused manner without burning any bridges with upstreams unnecessarily. There are going to be more than enough users running Unity7 or Unity8 to be the test bed, generating more than enough bug reports for the Mir/Xmir stack than can be handled...without the complication of other DEs.

This is solvable.

But Canonical has to put down the gasoline can and the match and step away from the bridge they are hellbent on burning with external developers of competing DEs projects.

-jef

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 3:30 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

I'm not sure who you are referring to, but I haven't seen Canonical attacking any developers.

I've seen a lot of non-canonical folks expressing disappointment over the anti-mir attitudes

By the way, your prescription of what they need to do seems to match fairly well with what they are actually doing, concentrating primarily on Mir/Unity for 13.10, with XMir supporting everything else, but they are not refusing to help anyone else who expresses any interest.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 30, 2013 2:44 UTC (Sun) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Xmir supporting everything else is still a problem for any non-Canonical backed upstream development team. Until an upstream affirms they are willing to deal with any xmir related regression issues and affirm they are interested in and have the capability to smoke test their DE on top of xmir as part of their upstream development..then Ubuntu as a project should hold off on having the DE operation ontop of xmir as default.

For 13.10 the compromise solution here is to default Unity8 to Mir and Unity7 to Xmir and everything else runs over xorg X11 by default with the option for users to switch over to xmir for any DE. This approach gives external upstream devs and DE users the piece of mind of being able to work with a known stack by default while at the same time giving them all the ability to approach xmir on their own terms and to hopefully gain some confidence in it being something they can support upstream without being forced to abruptly deal with it without a FULL ubuntu release cycle to come to terms with the tech.

Canonical is on a forced march with Unity and Mir over the precipice . And that's fine for them, their engineer and their management team. But they can't not expect to drag all the competing DEs developers along with them and its foolhardy and wasteful in terms of political capital to even attempt it (they've burned so much trust already with the announcement). The way forward is to make Mir and Xmir an optional tech preview for all the other DEs in the Ubuntu repository. Gives those projects a chance to come to terms with Mir/Xmir as delivered in 13.10 with the hope they'll affirm its a supportable stack for 14.04.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 30, 2013 19:15 UTC (Sun) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link] (2 responses)

The switch from xorg to xmir is not going to be easy like Canonical management seems to be hoping; these things never are in the real world, where users have millions of different combinations of graphic cards and desktop settings and favorite applications.

If I were on the mir dev team, I would be wishing strongly that management switch to the more conservative roll-out that jspaleta recommends. I would want to be focusing on shaking out all the mir issues with Unity, and trying to recruit some other DE that wants to be adventurous to be the next guinea pig. A smaller one, that would have something to gain by the publicity of having a mir port, not KDE or Gnome.

Smart Ubuntu devs may already have this as their fallback plan: they can install xorg alongside xmir, and put in a user-friendly way to switch between backends. When compatibility issues crop up in RC testing, they can also switch the default backend to classic xorg for Lubuntu and Xubuntu installs (and Kubuntu could follow suit).

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jul 1, 2013 2:08 UTC (Mon) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, isn't X a protocol that allows multiple implementations and multiple implementations do exist?

If any DE/WM have trouble running on top of XMir, then either side might have bugs. And debugging can help either side.

Do you think it is OK for a display server to only work with Unity?
DO you think it is OK for a DE/WM to only work with Xorg as X implementation?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jul 1, 2013 6:53 UTC (Mon) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link]

> Do you think it is OK for a display server to only work with Unity?
> DO you think it is OK for a DE/WM to only work with Xorg as X implementation?

I can tell you didn't follow my train of thought at all, so I'll try to explain better: carefully planned roadmaps can make roll-outs of significant changes a lot less painful to other people, so that you get a lot more cooperation in the long run.

Supposing you're in charge of the mir team with fairly limited manpower -- it's not a good idea to do a big switch-over with millions of users and suddenly break hundreds of applications at the same time, including plenty of apps with peeved maintainers who will go around telling everyone not to use mir because "it is a piece of junk" that "breaks everything".

Now suppose instead you just focused a second totally independent project to integrate with mir. This will bring out a lot more of the important bugs, especially since this second implementation is done with a lot less direct influence from the original in-house devs. After fixing the critical bugs turned up in this key effort, pick some more projects to persuade to try a mir port, and that will make it even more robust without turning the world against you.

Then mir is stable at the point you can reasonably include xmir as an alternative to xorg, but making sure that xorg is still available for users to easily switch in case they run into serious bugs that you can't quickly fix. Bugs in some obscure legacy apps may never get fixed, but who needs to waste time with those because the users will either continue to use a system frozen in time or else eventually find a replacement; on the other hand, properly maintained X apps should only have the occasional bug to deal with, and not a flood that makes them rebel and start closing all the xmir bugs. Plus having a quick way to switch to and from xorg allows users to work around bugs as they discover them, and less likely to get upset and rude on bug trackers (both for mir and for the affected apps).

Do you see anything wrong with the second, more conservative, approach? Is it likely to be bad for mir or unity in any way?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 22:44 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (14 responses)

For those who want to be blind followers of some self-appointed upstreams, I guess Ubuntu is probably not their cup of teas.

The problem for Kubuntu is that they're trying to follow two upstream developers that are pulling them in different directions. Ubuntu's long term plans involve switching to Mir, and KDE's long term plans involve switching to Wayland. Kubuntu is left in the middle, forced either to figure out a satisfactory way of getting KDE to run on Mir or to keep X.org (and eventually get Wayland) running on Ubuntu. There simply isn't any way of avoiding this kind of challenge when two upstream projects disagree about long-term strategy.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 4:23 UTC (Sat) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (13 responses)

No, I've never seen Kubuntu devs showed any interest following Ubuntu as upstream. They just repeat Mir FUD all the times and never show people anything concrete.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 13:38 UTC (Sat) by kitterma (guest, #4448) [Link] (12 responses)

Go look and see what the default fonts are in Kubuntu and then consider this comment is as ill informed as the rest of the anti-Kubuntu, Canonical fanboi crap you are spreading.

Personally, I disagreed with that change, but the fact is, sometimes, where people think it makes sense, Kubuntu will follow along with the rest of the distribution. LightDM is another example.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 16:10 UTC (Sat) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (11 responses)

I said "never" in the context of Mir issue, because that's the context of rgmoore's comment.

If you are unable understand there is some ambiguity in natural languages, well, you'd better do something else.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 16:16 UTC (Sat) by kitterma (guest, #4448) [Link] (9 responses)

Even that's wrong. We've said time and time again we've decided what Kubuntu is doing for 13.10. The future is unpredictable and we'll do what makes sense when we get there.

In any case, I'm now convinced you're just trolling and not actually caring about facts or anything but stirring up trouble, so you'll get no more replies from me. Have a nice life.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 16:28 UTC (Sat) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (6 responses)

Have you read Riddell's blog post or the parent article in the first place?

Do you have difficulties understand what does "We'll be staying with X on the images for our 13.10 release now in development and the 14.04LTS release next year." mean?

You said you've just decided for 13.10? What a plain lie.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 21:02 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (5 responses)

> You said you've just decided for 13.10? What a plain lie.

He didn't say that they didn't decide for 14.04, just that the decision to not use Mir in 13.04 has been made and isn't going to change. I certainly wouldn't want my users to be subjected to the first attempt at Mir/XMir for an LTS. Are you trying to be adversarial at this point?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 30, 2013 2:43 UTC (Sun) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (4 responses)

Again, read the main article, emphasize mine: We'll be staying with X on the images for our 13.10 release now in development and the 14.04LTS release next year."

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 30, 2013 3:19 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

It isn't just Kubuntu. None of community spins seem ready to ship Mir without upstream support and unless there is a compelling advantage, I don't expect they will anytime soon.

http://lubuntublog.blogspot.com/2013/06/lubuntu-willl-not...

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 30, 2013 5:12 UTC (Sun) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

I don't expect Xfce and LXDE switch to Wayland any time soon either, probably never, unless one day they are forced to use XWayland or XMir. I guess you probably know Xfce better than me.

But anyway, LXDE/Lubuntu people is much less annoying than their KDE/Kubuntu counter part.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 30, 2013 3:32 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Did you even read my comment or just pick keywords out to get your own meaning from it? How did what he said contradict that? He *did not say that 14.04 wasn't decided*, only that 13.10 has been. In any case, I can't fault them for going with not doing an initial release for a new, untested, display server in an LTS release.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 30, 2013 5:02 UTC (Sun) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

My bad, I didn't notice that you said "didn't" twice.

But again, he said "The future is unpredictable and we'll do what makes sense when we get there." to prove my "No, I've never seen Kubuntu devs showed any interest following Ubuntu as upstream. They just repeat Mir FUD all the times and never show people anything concrete." in the context of Mir issue wrong?

As for not good switching display server for an LTS, this is the reason why one should start from 13.10, if the team concerned has non-zero interest.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 21:12 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

given the timeframe for 13.10 and the fact that Canonical is going t be making a lot of changes as they push hard to get Unity working and polished, it makes a huge amount of sense for Kubuntu to hold off and not try to support Mir for that version.

I will say that this is the first post that I can remember seeing that left the future open. Everything else I've seen could be summed up as "Mir is Evil and KDE/Kubuntu will not support it now or ever"

playing the 'wait and see' game to see how well it works in 13.10, and how much churn there is going to need to be in 14.04 to fix the things they didn't get right in 13.10 seems like a very prudent approach.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 30, 2013 2:57 UTC (Sun) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

If Riddell is decided while another guy says he is undecided, I still count Kubuntu as decided.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jul 1, 2013 18:16 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

I said "never" in the context of Mir issue, because that's the context of rgmoore's comment.

I guess I didn't express myself clearly, then, because I really did mean that Kubuntu depends on Ubuntu as upstream for most of its stuff and only deliberately differs on the issue of the supported desktop. In that one case, the disagreement between Canonical and KDE about Mir vs. X and (eventually) Wayland is forcing them to make a choice about something beyond just the desktop. They must either choose either Mir, which isn't supported by upstream KDE, or X (and eventually Wayland) which is Canonical is deprecating.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jul 2, 2013 3:18 UTC (Tue) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

That's rich, unless you're going to be equally damning of Canonincal's long-running history of forking and declaring themselves the new upstream.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 9:24 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (2 responses)

Does someone know how do the Mir people expect to solve the interoperation between X and native applications?

It seems that KDE can now be run on top of XMir. I assume that this includes running KWin, the KDE window manager. If Mir follows a similar architecture to Wayland (and I believe it does), then KWin will handle only X11 clients, not native Mir clients. Is KDE actually running isolated from Mir clients?

In Wayland this will be solved by making KWin a Wayland compositor, probably doubling as a X11 window manager for current X11 applications. How will they handle it in Mir?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 11:50 UTC (Fri) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]

Proper support would require making KWin a Mir compositor and adapting Plasma Workspaces in much the same way that Unity will be.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 28, 2013 15:36 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Canonical-to-push-for-Mir-in-Ubuntu-13-10-1902425.html

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 4:49 UTC (Sat) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (5 responses)

BTW, I noticed all attacks towards Canonical/Mir are from employees of Blue Systems.

Shouldn't Blue Systems acquire a new name for their premier KDE-based distro and stop using company C's trademark and attacking company C from time to time.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 13:25 UTC (Sat) by kitterma (guest, #4448) [Link] (2 responses)

That's about as accurate as the rest of your comments. Have you interpreted my comments as being in favor of Mir, perhaps?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 15:58 UTC (Sat) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

I'm not talking about Scott Kitterman. And I'm not aware of whether or not Scott Kitterman blogged about Mir or not.

If Scott Kitterman find something inaccurate in my other posts, can Scott Kitterman be specific?

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 16:33 UTC (Sat) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link]

The bottom line is that I didn't count Scott Kitterman as attacking Canonical/Mir.

Maybe I overlooked something, maybe he has a different standard.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 13:46 UTC (Sat) by smartboyhw (guest, #89471) [Link] (1 responses)

I think we have to clarify here: Scott Kitterman is DEFINITELY not a Canonical employee.

Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

Posted Jun 29, 2013 13:47 UTC (Sat) by smartboyhw (guest, #89471) [Link]

And also, definitely NOT a Blue Systems employee.