Mir+Unity: Has Ubuntu lost it?

[viking60]

Until recently Ubuntu has done a great job of promoting Linux.

Now Ubuntu seems to have a goal to create the greátest possible distance between themselves and the rest of the Linux world.
Where Oracle RedHat and Novell are all working on Wayland with 10 thosands of developers Canonical has a mere 300 to implement Mir

KDE and Gnome are porting to Wayland so you might be stuck with Unity on Ubuntu in the future.

Canonical are asking for problems - and will get them; as we can se from the bugs
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1063354
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1073433
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1124803

Here Canonical/Ubuntu could benefit from the work of others with both more manpower and more knowledge than Canonical posesses.
(Canonical has never been a major contributor to the Linux kernel - only a heavy user of it)

Once they are in that fish pond of their own, they will have to do most of it allone. So their tech people see that and shorten down the service length for all Ubuntu installations.

This might pull Mint down too and has made longterm Ubuntu users advise people to start looking for alternatives.

The popularity of Ubuntu did drop like a stone with Unity and it will continue to do even more so with Mir - unless they come up with something spectacular.

The question is simply if you want to build up a dependency towards Canonical /Ubuntu or if it makes more sence to trust the huge resources of all other Linux participants.

There are no dependencies there because they are all competing, but smart enough to see that common bugfixes improves all of them.

My money is on IBM RedHat Oracle Novell+++

So it looks like Ubuntu has lost it, and that it is time to look for an alternative.

[dedanna1029]

Well, I'm sure the whole Wayland/Mir/whatever (there's another, can't remember the name of it offhand) thing has us all a tad uneasy anyway, wondering if it will work OK, and what it will be like. We're all thinking at least somewhat, that it won't be like our good ol' Linux, our X, etc. etc.

I've been watching the xscreensavers go away from Mageia over time (now in 3). There is now only one package for xscreensaver (unlike in Mageia 2) in the repos. This has yours truly a bit upset; I love my xscreensavers, and still to this day, compiz, etc. I'll probably never use Gnome again in my life because of how it's gone (very unfortunately; I was die-hard with it until Gnome 3). I wonder how Wayland will make it for Gnome, and how much it will cater to the stupid smartphone crap (I also worry about this in KDE and other WMs), as well as lack of our pretties. Remains to be seen, I guess.

My point is, this time, to me, it doesn't matter if Ubuntu goes Mir, and everyone else goes Wayland. I think the reverberations of the effects of each will bring their own problems for people, at least for several years. I know it will for me, and I'm thinking it's just about time to go the dynebolic or something like that. I'm almost there. Just need time to do it is all. I have not for at least two years liked the way Linux desktops are headed, and still do not. They've done nothing with them that is actually pleasing to me.

[viking60]

I may have to eat my words:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Canonica ... 4778.shtml

Looks like there will be versions of Gnome3 and KDE for Mir.

That is good news because that means that we will have a choice and that we not will be locked down to Unity.
Now this has just become another interesting Linux development - for a while there it looked like an exclusion thing...

And you are the most conservative person on earth dedanna If anything changes I know who is going to shot at it

[dedanna1029]

I may have to eat my words too. Via a search for something else that I was running in MCC in MGA3, I found by accident the rest of the xscreensaver packages, when I'd been looking for a good while. lol. It's great for IceWM.

Meh. As I said, Wayland, Mir, etc. - what's the diff in the end? I think, even still, they are distancing themselves from the rest of the crowd so to speak, but then there's really nothing new in the end on that, is there? They've kind of gone their Canonical way for a fair few years now, aye?

[viking60]

Well Canonical has given no valid reason other than "not invented here" for going for Mir.
What they originally criticized Wayland for turned out to be wrong.

X needs some modernization and that is all this is. It is sad that they cannot cooperate about something basic as that. Canonical is constantly trying to create distance to Linux while they are the heaviest users of the Kernel that others have created for them.

It turns out that KDE and Gnome runs on Mir like running IE under Linux with Wine - that is no good.

Microsoft is a bigger contributor to the kernel than Canonical.

Canonical wants to lock you down to their solutions only - they are a business so that is an understandable motive.
But they need to achieve that by being the best rather than by excluding the rest.

I think Canonical would have been more successful if they actually shared as much as they are taking.
They are the no. one in Marketing so they would only have a better product to market.

Linux needs Canonical and I really would like for them to give me opportunity to support them - their take on the MS signature for UEFI secure boot is the best.
They will not have anything to do with MS signing their products - so they made their own key

[dedanna1029]

Yeah, that is the one good thing about them, is fighting MS. Can we count the number of distros that have got into bed with MS over the years? HOWEVER... let's not forget their strong support of mono.

I think we can not count them. I'm just waiting for the Official Linux Windows desktop (Let's say a mix of wayland and mir both; don't put it past 'em). Oh, wait, icewm already has that with several of its themes, and distros offer to install those themes.

I'm wondering what other desktops will do with the influx of mir and wayland both. They have to be able to deal with them. Some of the best lightweight ones have all but been eliminated in a lot of distros. EvilWM (which this kid would kill to have back), for example. Will Canonical have it when they go mir? lol. I think not.