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

Posted Jun 27, 2013 20:56 UTC (Thu) by sebas (guest, #51660)
In reply to: Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir by maxiaojun
Parent article: Riddell: Kubuntu Won't be Switching to Mir or XMir

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.