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Canonical writing their own X/Wayland replacement

68 pointsby shadeslayerabout 12 years ago

10 comments

randalluabout 12 years ago
Ha, I bet this one will crash and burn over Fiji too.<p>More information here: <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec</a><p>They don't like X for all the normal reasons, they think Wayland might be like X but haven't investigated (I think you can replace the input handling in the "compositor" plugin; maybe I'm wrong).<p>They don't specify how they'll handle hard problems, such as:<p>- Client vblank sync (as well as compositor vblank sync). Compiz, unity, etc, don't do this now; clients run unsynced and tear.<p>- Switching unoccluded windows to render directly to the framebuffer instead of going through the compositor. Mandatory for good performance on something like a Nexus 10 (which has a 16MB framebuffer, so nearly 1GB/s bandwidth to deliver glClear at 60fps with no extra copies...).<p>- Handling multiple clients that want to read gestures. They actually say in their "INPUT" section that they will handle "shell" gestures "in the server", which sounds like they're going to bake their UI into their display server.<p>They want it to be compatible with all of the old apps too, which Wayland already does. I'm trying not to be judgemental, but it sounds like they want to write something like Wayland but without designing it first. Good luck with re-entry, guys.
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ISLabout 12 years ago
Open source is wonderful. Good luck to Ubuntu, though I love X. As an end user of X, fluxbox, and X-forwarding over ssh, X just works. I'm not looking forward to compatibility troubles when the new fleet of X replacements arrives.<p>Debian, please continue to maintain old stalwarts as Ubuntu and other distros flirt with the new.
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mercurialabout 12 years ago
You may want to go to <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MirSpec</a> if you want to read about their motivations. I don't enough about Wayland to say if their argumentation is justified or not.
nuclear_eclipseabout 12 years ago
Somehow, I'm less than surprised. I'm waiting for them to decide to roll their own browser, email client, and office suite...
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meatyabout 12 years ago
They ought to fix all the pretty basic bugs and commit to actually supporting their customers before they bite this off.<p>LaunchPad is a testament to the shit state Ubuntu is in. All the windows are broken so we'll knock half the building down and rebuild it. Doesn't work.
scarmigabout 12 years ago
...really?<p>X is an abomination. But why not Wayland? Anyone care to present Canonical's argument, with concrete examples of what they find so offensive about it?
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chris_wotabout 12 years ago
I think it's just as interesting (if not more so) that they are moving away from Gnome to Qt!
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IgorPartolaabout 12 years ago
Another item of note in this post is that they are moving Unity to Qt.
shmerlabout 12 years ago
Did they give any rationale why they can't use Wayland?
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Zigurdabout 12 years ago
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet: Ubuntu was able to cobble together Ubuntu Touch running on Surface Flinger as a compositor.<p>There are limitations to that, including lack of really working support for multiple monitors.<p>Mir may be designed to fill in the deficiencies of Surface Flinger for use as a compositor for Ubuntu. That might make project scope controllable enough to think it could succeed.