Garrett: The state of XMir

[Posted October 3, 2013 by corbet]

Matthew Garrett has posted an assessment of where XMir development stands. "This is an unfortunate situation to be in. Ubuntu Desktop was told that they were switching to XMir, but Mir development seems to be driven primarily by the needs of Ubuntu Phone. XMir has to do things that no other Mir client will ever cope with, and unless Mir development takes that into account it's inevitably going to suffer breakage like this. Canonical management needs to resolve this if there's any hope of ever shipping XMir as the default desktop environment."

Garrett: The state of XMir

Posted Oct 6, 2013 7:11 UTC (Sun) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link] (2 responses)

Didn't I see many comments to this post just a few days ago?

Garrett: The state of XMir

Posted Oct 6, 2013 8:03 UTC (Sun) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

No; there was a previous 'state of XMir' from mjg59 that did get a large number of comments though, not that long ago.

I think pretty much all the arguments have been run at this point. Canonical are doing their own thing, Ubuntu users will be put on it in the future, no-one else is interested in using it so far.

So long as this doesn't seriously disrupt the video driver space (and people seem to be talking about EGL right now) there's probably no point getting bent out of shape about it now. It's basically business as usual for Canonical to be running on their own toolset.

Garrett: The state of XMir

Posted Oct 6, 2013 8:18 UTC (Sun) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]

There was a post announcing that Ubuntu 13.10 will not run Mir by default a few days back which did generate a number of comments.

Garrett: The state of XMir

Posted Oct 8, 2013 4:41 UTC (Tue) by glaesera (guest, #91429) [Link] (1 responses)

In my opinion Canonicals main problem is that they rely on Google-services for internal communication. Due to this the communication is bad.
Google abuses the information gained from it for their marketing-tactics. They dominate the online-marketing business with a market-share of 90%. In words: ninety percent.
Even the launchpad bug-tracking-system uses that Analytics-service by default, unless you block it with some browser-plugin.
So: this is clearly the main problem, that needs to be addressed, Xmir is probably just going to be the default half a year later, no harm done really.
It is simply not possible to introduce anything new to the market, that competes directly with Google-products at this time.

Garrett: The state of XMir

Posted Oct 8, 2013 8:19 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Using Google services is just a tool. It can be a cause for bad communication, but doesn't have to be. The rest of your post has nothing to do about communication, but more about possible secrecy. Launchpad allows search engines to index Launchpad. Seems a bit conspiracy theory to suggest that Analytics is used by Google to spy on competitors if I understand you correctly. Obviously if you add a Analytics thing to a website, you should only add it on public pages. No idea if that is done on Launchpad, but that's just basic security IMO. And regarding security: it is far easier to send some people off to conferences, you'll hear enough (even if just rumours).

Xmir seems destined to remain a Canonical-only solution. But I finally think I understand the reason for starting it: being able to control the pace of their phone product.

Regarding XMir and your Google/communication bit: Things are worked on at the same time. Some people work on XMir, some on the distribution, some on the phone bit, some on Launchpad. Cool that you have a pet peeve, but you have failed to show that it is a problem. Further, you have failed to show that this should be prioritized over XMir or that the XMir team could do that.