Xfce, LXDE, GNOME3 Desktops Running On Ubuntu Mir Via XMir 162
An anonymous reader writes "Through the use of XMir, a translation layer for running legacy X11 applications atop Ubuntu's forthcoming Mir display server, the GNOME Shell, Xfce, and LXDE desktops now run on this X.Org Server alternative. With XMir, the traditional window managers are still running while Mir treats these desktops as a single window."
What about wayland?? (Score:3)
Re:What about wayland?? (Score:5, Funny)
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Then there is the port of the KDE / Almquist shell integration - Kashmir
[groan]
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But should it run in user land, kernel land or wayland?
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But what about wayland on X (sounds possible given the architecture) or mir for cross compatibility,
The you can have XmirXwalylandXXmirXwaylandmirwaylandXmirXwaylandwaylandmirX
Pro tip: don't forget to have an actual graphics device in there somewhere.
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Multiple Displays? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Multiple Displays? (Score:5, Insightful)
Each running separate X sessions and unable to move a window from one display to another? That is what I got the day I tried a second graphics card in my PC to connect a second monitor.
The OS was an Ubuntu version released long after Windows 7 and it still expected me to write some xinerama xorg.conf bullshit, which would have probably ended with maximized windows covering both displays and modal windows appearing right in the middle, on both sides of the physical divide. But I think I would have had to give up running the nvidia driver. LOL!
Sad thing is Windows 98 SE happily ran multiple monitors on different graphics cards (different card, different driver, different vendor).
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> Sad thing is Windows 98 SE happily
Probably not. You may not even be old enough to have even touched it yourself ever.
Mixing multiple vendors for different displays isn't even a recommended Windows setup now.
Re:Multiple Displays? (Score:4, Interesting)
I will now get off of your lawn
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Recommended no...maybe not. Supported. Yes.
Some of us have run multiple monitor and multiple graphics card setups since Win98 and NT 4 on 440BX reference boards and the shit just worked. Despite my love for FOSS let's be intellectually honest here. It took X a extra decade worth of development time to have decent multi-mon support and it had nothing to do with shitty vendor drivers. You couldn't run two Monochrome/VGA or SVGA X servers in Parallel and do window sharing.
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Voodoo2 can do some 2D, there are Linux drivers which enable you to use it for the only display. Too bad I sold mine before I learned about this, it would have been an interesting experiment.
In fact, if you think about it, 2D is a subset of 3D -- a texture, or one face of a cuboid, etc. Modern display hardware and software tend to use 3D engines for 2D stuff, so you don't need to write separate 2D engines. We used to have specialized 2D hardware tricks for a long time, but these days pretty much everythi
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http://support.microsoft.com/kb/182708 [microsoft.com]
"The video adapters that are installed in your computer do not have to be identical. Each video adapter and monitor combination is separately enumerated by Windows; you can configure each combination to use different screen resolutions and color depths. For example, you can set the primary adapter to 1024 X 768 pixels with 256 colors and the secondary ad
Re:Multiple Displays? (Score:5, Informative)
Been using X since the 80s, and mutil monitors on X since somewhere in the late 90s, both with the displays all on the same box, and later, with some of the displays running on separate computers using xdmx.
Using Xorg.conf for xinerama config, while maybe not ideal for grandma, wasn't terrible, and you only did it once. But, for folks like you, there is now xrandr which you can setup via xorg.conf, use your WMs hooks into it to do it all gui-ish, or just run shell commands to setup your multi-monitor layout (since it would be trivial to write [hell you could do it in a short shell script], there is probably a daemon available that will auto add a monitor when plugged in and remove it when unplugged, but I am not familiar with it if it exists).
As for not being able to move a window between monitors, you are doing it wrong. Depending upon your window manager, and how *you* set things up, you can have independent displays (uncommon, but apparently how you set things up), one big shared desktop like windows and mac (gnome, kde, etc.), or, something smarter, a kind of hybrid between the two where things act like a unified desktop when you want them to, but you can switch virtual desktops independently per each physical display-- which is *very* nice (e17).
You can drag windows between displays even when the displays are on different boxes (xdmx). Unfortunately xdmx only works with xinerama, and newer graphics cards only work with xrandr, so in a crappy transition period now for this. But, if you ever want to setup a video wall with 100 monitors acting as one unified display, xdmx is probably the only game in town.
If you want to use MS Windows, nobody is stopping you, but please don't spread FUD.
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I believe that Xrandr is a new event aletring windows that the screen configuration has changed (and a mechanism to query available changes and select them). Xinerama is the mechanism for dealing with multiple physical screens, their locations, gaps between them etc.
The two work well together and I believe that they are designed to work together.
Waay too easy. (Score:4, Informative)
Using Xorg.conf for xinerama config, while maybe not ideal for grandma, wasn't terrible, and you only did it once. But, for folks like you, there is now xrandr which you can setup via xorg.conf, use your WMs hooks into it to do it all gui-ish, or just run shell commands to setup your multi-monitor layout (since it would be trivial to write [hell you could do it in a short shell script], there is probably a daemon available that will auto add a monitor when plugged in and remove it when unplugged, but I am not familiar with it if it exists).
Unfortunately xdmx only works with xinerama, and newer graphics cards only work with xrandr, so in a crappy transition period now for this. But, if you ever want to setup a video wall with 100 monitors acting as one unified display, xdmx is probably the only game in town.
You had me at "Just right click and click output to and select multi-monitor". Phew that was easy.
Except you didn't say that. What you propose is something that Linux was known for in the 90s, really shit complicated and borderline unusable multi-monitor support.
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No. This is Linux. Often the command line is easier than the disaster which is most gui-ish implementations, OR the gui-ish implementation is so dumbed down that the result breaks and you need to drop in the command line anyway.
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No. This is Linux. Often the command line is easier than the disaster which is most gui-ish implementations, OR the gui-ish implementation is so dumbed down that the result breaks and you need to drop in the command line anyway.
But... it's not. The GUIs for this work quite well. You can keep trying to prop this strawman up, but he's still made of straw.
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Ok so what popular out of the box user friendly distro supports this without creative tweaking? Ubuntu? Mint? Nope, and they account for the lions share of user friendly distros. Just google Ubuntu multimonitor and see the clusterfuck of tweaks that need to be done to fix certain nuances of the horrendous Linux multimonitor support. Just the top two results, one ends up going back to a custom xorg.conf, the other uses a bloody hex editor to fix flash fullscreening to wrong window issues. Oh hell just search
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Ok so what popular out of the box user friendly distro supports this without creative tweaking? Ubuntu?
Yep. It's worked flawlessly for me many times.
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I can relate to this.
Granted, I have seen it work just fine with different cards.
But with nvidia, I have two different cards and, yep, can't move a window from one screen to another.
debian linux on x86_64
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For the record, I was running a geforce 8400GS and Radeon 7000 PCI on linux mint 13 Mate (i.e. Ubuntu 12.04 with Gnome 2's fork). The 8400GS could only do one VGA output for some reason.
Ten years ago I got a Voodoo5 5500, S3 Virge DX and S3 Virge running together on 98SE (just to try it out, then I used dual display a bit). Even videos would display on two screens at once when windows media player 6.0's overlapped the border, which I found was unexpected and impressive.
I can get that it was probably nvidia'
Nvidia? (Score:2)
I mean, the Linux community has been bitching about this too. It sounds like an Nvidia Optimus laptop. The fact of the matter is that Nvidia is the villian in this story, not Linux. Search around a bit (hint: maybe Linus has a thing or two to say).
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I had this experience too. I managed to get it running with a single X session, but XRandR only supports one "screen" (in X11 terms) per GPU, which means that you can drag windows between monitors on the same GPU, but the monitors on the other GPU are separate and you can't drag windows over to them. (Here's a corroborating mailing list post [gmane.org].) Window dragging works with Xinerama (windows maximized properly etc), but Xinerama doesn't work with 2D hardware acceleration, so you lose that.
Even with Xinerama, I
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Will that work with different nvidia cards? Ie, one 4500 and one 5000?
I think I tried this and it did not, but I can't remember the details of everything I attempted.
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Finally some competition for Wayland (Score:1)
I mean that in the nicest way. X is obviously on the way out (long term), and something has to replace it. XWayland looks promising since it got an early lead, but I appreciate the fact that Ubuntu has made dealing with video drivers easy, and I imagine working with Valve has given them some insight to what they think is needed. I disagree with some of Canonicals positions in other areas (systemd), but I'm patient enough to wait and see a victor emerge eventually. And hopefully we can avoid a bigger fiasco
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X11 is a little long in tooth, X12 will most likely be the next windows system.
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Is there going to be an X12? Some of the main X11 devs are working on Wayland. Have any thought about doing an X12?
X12 just was a tentative name for some imaginary future replacement. Even though there were some X12 ideas docs in the past, the reality is that Wayland the the de facto X12.
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I appreciate the fact that Ubuntu has made dealing with video drivers easy, and I imagine working with Valve has given them some insight to what they think is needed.
Mandriva added easy driver installation to Linux way before Ubuntu's Jockey even existed.
Canonical also does not develop drivers, therefore I don't get how you think it matters what Canonoical may know what's needed. So far the FOSS drivers were developed by AMD (radeon), Intel, Google (Gallium-based Intel drivers), SUSE (radeonhd), and Red Hat (nouveau, radeon, and more). Canonical never ever even touched GPU driver code.
pictures of all desktops mentioned running on XMir (Score:5, Informative)
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So basically (Score:2)
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What's outdated about X11? And no, the presence of old API calls for backwards compatibility does not make it outdated.
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What's outdated about X11? And no, the presence of old API calls for backwards compatibility does not make it outdated.
Answer: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_wayland_situation&num=1 [phoronix.com]
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This is how it's done, and this is how it has been done for a long, long time.
That brand new Intel CPU in your machine? Yeah, it still runs the same code its predecessor did back in 1976. The internals have changed and become more complex many times, but the outdated interface is still there if you need it. It's not pretty, but there's not really any other way.
Nothing gained for Ubuntu (Score:2)
Soon these Desktops will need wayland. so they need to run wayland on Xmir to run Xfce. Have a lot of fun...
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Soon these Desktops will need wayland. so they need to run wayland on Xmir to run Xfce. Have a lot of fun...
I don't see a real problem with just ending Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.
Despite PR talk, Canonical is not interested in them. If Canonical was, Mir would not exist and Wayland would be used as originally planned.
There are many fine Linux distributions that ship Xfce etc.
Obligatory Russian Space Station Joke (Score:2)
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Cool
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If you understand the title of this story, I'm pretty sure you've never had sex.
I understand the title and I am quite sure that I get more sex than you do.
Re:FOSS overload (Score:5, Funny)
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Had sex once. Got bored halfway through. Went back to my Linux box. Much more interesting than trying to find nontrivial words in a language with only two words, In and Out, and one form of punctuation.
Oh come on now! That's enough for binary; you should be able to say anything!
Re:FOSS overload (Score:5, Funny)
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It does sound like it should be a common joke, doesn't it. We grew up in a very small country town in outback Australia. Total population of 25. I was one of eight kids. My cousins down the road were an eight kid family too. Together we made up most of the population of our town. =D
The internet wasn't a thing in this town - too remote. So no, 13 - 14 year olds in the middle of whoop-whoop belonging to a Christian family
Re:Hello (Score:5, Insightful)
Thousands of distros, tens of DE's and WM's, lots of different graphical toolkits, tons of libraries with significant overlapping functions, tons of system utils that do similar things, 6 or 7 common http servers, but TWO graphics servers? FRAGMENTATION! It's all gonna fly apart!
You dumbass.
Re:Hello (Score:5, Informative)
there are actually at least 8 X servers
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OMG! It's worse than I thought! The Linux ecosystem, it's crumbling right in front of us!
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nah, we just have.deb based or .rpm based. some whackjobs use kooky shit like arch or gentoo but numbers are in the "statistical noise" range.
("are you chinese or japanese" -- Hank Hill to Laotion)
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make a bad joke and get modded "insigthful"......yeesh.......
Re:Hello (Score:5, Interesting)
The lower the level, the worse fragmentation is. Who cares how many text editors are out there, for instance? It doesn't matter, because you can use any of them that you please.
But lower down the chain, fragmentation becomes more of a problem, because things higher up the stack rely on standardization below them to work.
How many Linux kernels are there, for instance? Only one. (There's some different versions, but they're all compatible with each other as far as running application code.) (There's also *BSD and HURD, but those aren't used nearly as much, and at least one of the BSDs actually has a Linux compatibility layer to run binary Linux applications.) Until recently, there was only one display server, X; so graphical applications and toolkits only had to work with that. Then along came Wayland, which promised to fix a lot of problems with X; this wasn't so bad: most of us knew that X was long in the tooth and a replacement had to come sooner or later, so having everyone transition from the old to the new was a doable thing. But now, stupid Canonical had to decide to fragment things with Mir, which does mostly the same thing as Wayland but in an incompatible manner, so who knows what's going to happen.
Anyway, back to your other complaints: different libraries aren't a problem. Using one library doesn't interfere with using another; applications just use whatever libraries they're linked against. System utils doing the same things isn't a problem: use the one you like, the others aren't going to keep you from doing that. Different HTTP servers is a good thing: use the one you like. Choice is a good thing, not a bad thing, as long as things are compatible. Graphical toolkits are a little lower on the stack, so that is a bit of a pain having more than one, so it's a balance between choice and standardization. Having two main ones doesn't seem so bad; 6 or 7 of them would be more of a problem. (There's more than 2 graphical toolkits, but only 2 of them are really in widespread use in Linux-land.) DEs are higher up the stack than toolkits; use the one you like. There's nothing preventing you from using KDE apps in GNOME, and vice-versa. However, DEs are lower than regular apps, usually have a lot of stuff integrated, and are the "face" seen by users, so it would be nice if Linux had its act together better in that regard. Of course, when a DE is tied directly to an incompatible display server, that really fragments things.
BTW, last I heard there were at least 3 or 4 different graphical toolkits for Windows (Win32, MFC, .NET), and those are all from the same company.
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The minute Canonical manages to get commercial driver support for lots of stuff I don't think you will be whining as much. Linux is built around choice, nobody forces you to use Mir or Wayland. So just choose whichever you like the most. And there are several Unix kernels, Linux being one of them. Trying to make a category of Linux in itself won't fly. OpenBSD was tough competition and you cannot go lower down the chain than this. It all worked out in the end, people like Gentoo bringing ports functionality
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The minute Canonical manages to get commercial driver support for lots of stuff I don't think you will be whining as much.
Whatever makes you think that? Nvidia and AMD have had commercial drivers for years and people keep on whining for all the obvious reasons like impossible to debug crashes, EOLing support for heardware early, slow to update to new kernels, poor support for "new" features like xrandr and so on.
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Until the application you want to run no longer supports X. But you need X for it's remote display capabilities...
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But now, stupid Canonical had to decide to fragment things with Mir, which does mostly the same thing as Wayland but in an incompatible manner, so who knows what's going to happen.
All projects that have tried to replace X so far has failed miserably, so I'd say the odds are against both of them. If Ubuntu can do it as quickly and easily as they think then more power to them, but I'm not holding my breath. The Wayland people are mostly seasoned X.org developers, I think they know better how complicated it really is. Either way I'm curious to see what Android AIOs [theverge.com] will do to the market, give it a big screen, keyboard and mouse then what happens? I'm not so sure X or Wayland or Mir is a
Re:Hello (Score:5, Informative)
Good god you're making me feel old. Not only have all the big three BSD OSes had Linux binary emulation for a long damn time... but I distinctly recall writing how-to's for a couple of them (that bounced around the internet and got translated into many languages I don't speak) some time LAST MILLENIUM.
No exaggeration there. The date on OpenBSD's compat_linux man page is March 1995. FreeBSD may have been a couple years earlier.
Re:Hello (Score:4, Informative)
millenium - a thousand anuses, from latin 'anus'
millennium - a thousand years, from latin 'annus'
FreeDesktop.org? (Score:3)
But think of something like FreeDesktop.org: it's possible for project to work together on standards in order to guarantee that other layers in the stack would indeed treat the layer next to them as interchangable.
So it's really less about technical difference than about a vibrant will and culture of cooperation. It's very unfortunate that there are sour grapes on various fronts: Canonical has gone about Mir quite poorly, and it's unclear at this state if there is a will for compatability on Wayland and M
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So, not really a problem if you have similar POSIX interface. How do you think Cygwin works?
Very, very poorly.
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Polishing a turd still leaves you with a turd in the end.
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Higher performance than what? With DRI/DRM, X11 based systems consistently get the best framerates for given hardware compared to other OSs. Hard to argue there's much room for improvement there.
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/bin/ls and friends are part of the base OS. What else do you need?
Re:Hello (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hello (Score:5, Insightful)
...except X.org is just another Xserver. It's not an entirely new protocol. This is why X servers and clients from a variety of Unixen and non-Unixen can all talk to each other.
It's like HTTP.
Mir is more like Microsoft trying to create it's own web browser protocol.
You should really follow your own advice.
Seems more like when Apple changed things for OSX (Score:2)
I dont think this is trying to force proprietary libraries. Its just trying to add something new with a compatibility layer for the old.
Re:Hello (Score:4, Informative)
You don't know much about software, do you?
X.org wasn't a different display server, it was a fork of XFree86. Not only did it use the exact same protocol, it even used the exact same code (at least at first, though they added some new extensions later after everyone dumped XFree86 and switched to X.org).
No one (except a few morons) said that the X.org fork would be the "demise" of Linux. I remember the whole thing quite well; everyone was relieved that X on Linux would finally stop stagnating, and get some much-needed new development without that idiot Dawes holding everyone back. Within a very short time, all the distros had switched to the new fork and XFree86 became nothing more than a memory.
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I remember the opposite, switch from XFree86 to Xorg was welcomed by the users instantly, as XFree86 succumbed to the same disease as the original X Consortium that XFree86 was an alternative for.
Re:Hello (Score:4)
Don't be ridiculous; the whole idea of Mir and Wayland is to speed up the desktop, as X is horribly obsolete and slow. This "XMir" is just so X stuff can be run on Mir until it gets updated to run on Mir directly.
Of course, there's a whole separate issue which is that Mir competes with Wayland and fragments the Linux infrastructure, but this doesn't affect speed.
Re:Hello (Score:5, Insightful)
what was that saying about developers and engineers. Windows was written by developers, Unix was designed by engineers?
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as X is horribly obsolete and slow.
Oh for heaven's sake, not this again!
[Citation needed]
Oh and here's mine:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=357678 [teamliquid.net]
So, if X is so horribly slow and "obsolete" how come it gets better frame rates than anything else?
Seriously, for high performance stuff, Xorg (via DRM/DRI) basically allows a shared library to dump data straight at the graphics card without even the kernel; getting in the way for most of it. That is very efficient, and why X gets as good
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The Quote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
Of course, using direct rendering, specially on a full screen application, you're bypassing the X server and it's slowness as much as possible.
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Of course, using direct rendering, specially on a full screen application, you're bypassing the X server and it's slowness as much as possible.
Firstly full screen has nothing to do with it and secondly, I don't get your point.
Any windowing system needs to be able to get out of the way as much as possible for maximum performance. Xorg already does that, thus making the claims that any new system will be faster a bunch of crap.
Re:Hello (Score:4, Insightful)
Err, no.
DRI get X out of the way a lot, but there still areas for improvement.
Besides using DRI for rendering (or doing it client side), once done rendering a frame, the X client needs to notify the X server so it can notify the X window manager so it can do it's job and notify the X server again so the frame can actually finally show up on screen on the correct place.
And while in theory an X server could do this very quickly and efficienty, the real X.org server is quite slow.
Clients also need to talk to the X server over other things like object property manipulation.
Once more, in theory an X server could handle this quickly and efficiently, the real X.org server is quite slow.
(And full screen does help, as there's less of this going on).
All in all, Wayland won't get you higher frame rates in Portal. But it will make your desktop smoother, with less CPU/GPU usage.
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Wayland specifically isn't just about getting out of the way to speed up rendering, but to throw out old bad assumptions that cause ugliness in the brief time rendering does take to catch up.
Resizing a window is bad in Windows XP and before, worse in X, and excellent in OS X, it's not the rendering speed, it's the ugliness as the rendering catches up (random flickers, fills with gray, or old textrures off the top of my head).
Will the new stuff be more compatible? (Score:2)
Are the designs (Mir, Wayland) more amenable for creating cross-platform libraries. Maybe the new stuff brings us closer to display libraries that can hop operating systems.
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Are the designs (Mir, Wayland) more amenable for creating cross-platform libraries.
Time will tell. From that point of view, X has proven exceptionally portable and has run on a massive variety of systems, both using native graphcis drivers and non native ones (XWayland, Xmir, Cygwin/X, Darwin/X).
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Canonical have had a public flamewar with KDE & Wayland devs about the existence of Mir.
KDE also have Plasma Active on Wayland in the pipeline, which would be a competitor to their tablet offering.
Hence the don't want to give legitimacy to the enemy.
[Posted from my Kubuntu 13.04 desktop - I guess I have a maximum of 12 months before X11 is dumped altogether in favour of Mir and I wipe the disk with debian stable]
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[Posted from my Kubuntu 13.04 desktop - I guess I have a maximum of 12 months before X11 is dumped altogether in favour of Mir and I wipe the disk with debian stable]
You can just move to Linux Mint KDE if you want. It's just like Kubuntu, without the ubuntu in the name and things seem slightly more polished. It remains to be seen whether Mint goes to Mir or Wayland, but since Mint doesn't support Unity at all, it'll probably be Wayland.
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Thanks for the tip.
I know Mint comes in both Ubuntu and debian flavours but the Ubuntu version might become sidelined if X support falls into maintenance and Ubuntu doesn't carry a functioning Wayland release.
(I'll verify which flavours are mirrored by my ISP!)
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So I heard but it isn't true: I tried it on my Thinkpad T61 when Unity first appeared, and Mint would not even install, despite Ubuntu having run fine since the T61 was manufactured. Fortunately I discovered
> apt-get install gnome-fallback-shell
and all is well (Not quite: the bastard that failed to make Unity/Gnome/Kde an option during the install process should still redeem his one-way ticket to the Gulag
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I do? I wasn't trying to take sides.
I thought the trouble started with the Mir project announcement that spread half-truths about Wayland's architecture, which the Wayland devs convey that no one from Canonical really commenced a dialogue on its capabilities. The 'deranged kwin dev' may be another story but as kubuntu is no longer a Canonical sponsored effort, it's a big ask for volunteers to upstream patches for a platform that, so far, only one distro uses and may bloat the architecture.
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You've got quite a selective memory there, bud. The only parties that are hurling Molotov's are in the Wayland and KDE camps (mostly from the deranged kwin dev).
The mere existence of Mir is "hurling Molotovs" at Wayland: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxODA [phoronix.com]
To claim that anybody other than Canonical started that "war", is simply lying.
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Canonical still owns Lubuntu & Xubuntu, but Kubuntu has been handed over to Blue Systems.
Blue Systems pay for Kubuntu but the Kubuntu trademark is owned by Canonical.
Blue Systems have their own Linux distribution called Netrunner which, for the time being, is based on Kubuntu.
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KDE has been deprecated since version 4.0.
Ah, but that was before GNOME3 was released. Suddenly KDE matters again.
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Brace yourselves, KDE 5 is coming!
For those that didn't hear already, KDE 4.11 will be the last Plasma Workspaces feature release in the KDE4 series and this upcoming version will be maintained for a period of two years. It will be feature-frozen and the developers will just provide bug-fixes.
Once KDE 4.11 is out the door, KDE developers can begin focusing much more of their efforts on KDE Frameworks 5, Qt 5, and KDE Plasma Workspaces 2.
This should also make Plasma Desktop 4.11 an excellent candidate for in
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Brace yourselves, KDE 5 is coming!
No: http://vizzzion.org/blog/2011/06/there-is-no-kde5/ [vizzzion.org]
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Re:KDE (Score:5, Informative)
He's talking BS.
Martin Graesslin, the KWin maintainer, began to prepare KWin for Wayland before Mir was even announced. So he designed the transition path to support two and only two back ends. See https://plus.google.com/115606635748721265446/posts/136nV4uojKH [google.com] for details (public post, no need for a G+ account).
Graesslin also made it repeatedly clear that he won't support single-distro solutions. That means no support for MS Windows in KWin, OSX' Quartz, or Android's SurfaceFlinger. Somehow nobody ever had a problem with that decision. Only after Canonocal announced Mir Ubuntu fanboys began to whine.
There are no technological benefits for Mir over Wayland. Canonical made false claims as outlined on http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxODA [phoronix.com] but they've since redacted the statements. Wayland even works with Android drivers: http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html [blogspot.fi]
The reasons for Mir are not technological, they are purely economical. Canonical wants to establish asymmetric licensing to have an economic advantage over the competition: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/25376.html [dreamwidth.org]
Wayland OTOH is under MIT/X11 license for everybody. This means that not only can any Linux vendor grab it and to anything with it, incl. to make an Android version that uses Wayland: http://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/2012/09/wayland-on-android-upgrade-to-404-and.html [blogspot.com]
Mir's licensing makes it forever impossible to become part of any major BSD variant. Wayland, however, is being ported to FreeBSD: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMwMzE [phoronix.com]
Wayland is being pushed by industry giants such as Intel and Red Hat, as well as smaller companies like Collabora (creators of many technologies commonly used on GNU-based Linux such as Telepathy, WebKit-GTK, etc.: https://www.collabora.com/projects/ [collabora.com] ).
Mir is just backed by Canonical who, while claiming to be the most popular Linux distributor, still makes no money: http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/canonical-ubuntu-linux-is-still-not-profitable.html [internetnews.com]
Re: (Score:2)
And yet even though Wayland is backed by 'giants' like Intel and Red Hat, it still doesn't have more than $400,000 available to the project.
Canonical has been dumping a lot more money into Mir.
I'm interested where you got those numbers from. I gave an extensive list of references, you gave none.
Considering that Canonical is still losing money (see above), it may be very plausible that Shuttleworth will at some point stop "dumping a lot more money into Mir".
Re: (Score:3)
Making significant headway with Mir, it probably won't be long till Red Hat hires this Canonical developer out from under them to put a kibosh on the project.
Significant headway? This is just X11 and Mir side by side using XMir. Something like this is possible with Wayland since at least a year, maybe even since 2011. For proof of running X11 applications under Wayland via XWayland see the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/waylandweston/videos [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
That makes no sense at all.
If I understood the mail discussion between Mir devs and others correctly, the display manager would "just" need to both Wayland and Mir to switch between a Wayland and a Mir session without reboot. The problem is that nobody wants to add Wayland support to LightDM (Canonical is not interested and anybody else would be required to sign the CLA and hand over all rights to Canonical which nobody wants) and nobody (incl. Canonical) wants to add and maintain Mir support in the other d