What are the Implications of Kubuntu with Wayland and Ubuntu with Mir

[woodsmoke]

I, personally take offence at this:

Pull up a chair and start drinking crappy rum now, folks. This ain't gonna be pretty.

I ALWAYS DRINK CRAPPY RUM.... that way I have the money to buy the boat later:



But..... how about BSD?

JOKING!!! LOL

woodsmoke

[whatthefunk]

This is depressing. I dont want to find a new OS:cry:

[SteveRiley]

It's obvious that Canonical has lost interest in keeping Ubuntu as a Linux distribution, and instead wants to build a kind of semi-proprietary operating system. The dilemma for the flavors, then is to decide whether to remain a distribution, and undergo necessary realignments, or whether to stick with Canonical. The former is more difficult, the latter seems dangerous.

[kubicle]

Doesn't really matter to me if they can make kwin run on Mir...if kubuntu starts using Mir I'm out before you can spell mississippi :P

[SteveRiley]

'non-Unity flavours and Mir from the ubuntu-devel mailing list: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ub...ne/037250.html

I have been waiting for precisely this discussion to take place. Riddell enumerates the options:

For Kubuntu the options are:
* Use Mir -- infeasable as upstream can't support it as described above [context: Mir being distro-specific and promising no ABI compatibility]
* Use Wayland with packages from Debian and hope we can make those packages live with Mir as best as possible
* End of Kubuntu

The second options is the one I'm expecting. It's completely unknown how much it means Kubuntu and other flavours will need to maintain X and Wayland packages, hopefully not much (it's hardly our speciality) and hopefully Debian and Ubuntu Desktop will support it enough.

The intrepid Scott Kitterman begins the hard conversation:

Given that mesa is going to be heavily patched to support Mir, I question the long term feasibility of supporting Wayland in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu folks reply, "What patches"? They seem unaware of Martin Graesslin's commentary:

Ubuntu has always had one of the worst graphics stack in the free software world. I can see this in the bug tracker. [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mesa] The quality of the Mesa stack in Ubuntu is really bad. For Mir Ubuntu will have to patch the Mesa stack even further. This is nothing which I would like to see. Also Mesa needs to be packaged with Wayland support. But will Canonical continue to do this? If not, would Kubuntu (and other Ubuntu flavors) need to ship their own Mesa stack? What if the changes by Canonical are so large that a standard Mesa stack doesn’t run on top of the Ubuntu stack?

Riddell, in response to Canonical's preference to put politics aside and just focus on the technical problems:

It's not a case of technical problems it's a case of Mir being different for no paticular advantage. It's a political problem of Canonical's making not KDE's. And the question is indeed what can we do in Ubuntu.

Canonical yammers about Mir "stakeholders" coming together for a discussion to "drive alignment" (this language makes me barf). ScottK says bug off:

See this is part of the problem. I don't WANT to be a Mir stakeholder. I want to focus my Kubuntu work on packaging KDE and making it work well. Historically, one of the great things about Kubuntu has been that we could rely on the work of the X team to give us a great display system with up to date hardware support that we didn't have to worry about.

Some bickering about the graphics stack quality occurs (seems Canonicial can't go look at bugs reported to KDE). Scott pulls the conversation back out of the weeds:

Kubuntu has always relied on the infrastructure provided in the Ubuntu archive to build our KDE variant on top of. It's pretty obvious to me that, at some point, this will no longer be feasible. The Kubuntu team certainly doesn't have the manpower or expertise to maintain their own X/Wayland stack. If, in the long run, the answer is to rely on Debian's maintenance effort for that, then the value of being part of the Ubuntu project is substantially diminished.

Canonical follows up with some vaguely-worded promise written in passive voice -- you know, the English language mechanism that escapes responsibility:

If Kubuntu (or any other flavor) can no longer be a *buntu flavor, I think everyone would all consider this an unacceptable outcome for the Mir project. Thanks to Jonathon and Scott for engaging in a constructive conversation about their requirements. I am confident that a mutual agreeable resolution to the technical issues will be released.

Pull up a chair and start drinking crappy rum now, folks. This ain't gonna be pretty.

[Rog131]

'therazr' asked "how is KDE going to support Mir since it's what Ubuntu chose?" : http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2013/06/14...el.html#t14:29

&

non-Unity flavours and Mir from the ubuntu-devel mailing list: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ub...ne/037250.html

[kubicle]

Guess again...
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/unity/

Mir may change that. If unity will only run on MIr, it would be a bigger task to port it to other distros (and probably not worth the effort)

[SteveRiley]

Like with Unity I believe it can not be used by anyone else.

Guess again...

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/unity/

[NoWorries]

Martin Graesslin, the maintainer of KWin, writes that we should expect to see an experimental Wayland backend in KWin with the release of 4.11 beta 1.

While I have been sleepinng there has certainly been a lot of very interesting pow wow on this topic.

I did see the reference to Wayland in 4.11 beta 1, but I got the impression that it was still experimental and had limitations. So it would be great if by the final release, Wayland was in 4.11:-o.

One feature that I believe will be in Wayland is its ability to automatically stop the screen saver starting when showing a full screen video with say VLC. At a group that I meet with, they are all MS Windows users and I always enjoy showing what Kubuntu can do. Unfortunately, on one occasion I forgot to disable the screen saver.

Wayland is a bigger project than Mir. Wayland, like most other large Linux projects, seeks to maintain some semblance of ABI (application binary interface) stability between releases. It must be distribution-agnostic, so that it can work on any distribution. And it will run an X server as a Wayland client, for backwards compatibility.

Canonical promises none of these for Mir. In fact, they specifically deny any effort to maintain ABI stability. Given that Mir has a smaller scope, which means less work to do, they might get something out the door in a year.

Looks like Canonical will be keeping this all for their own Desktop. Like with Unity I believe it can not be used by anyone else. I am waiting to see if with Mir they are able to hed for the moon:-o!

[dibl]

.... although I was welcomed at the forums, I had another username, they are not very much into forum stuff...

That is a fact, re: aptosid.

However, if you take a look at the siduction forum, you will see a much livelier group, although the dev team really prefers working with you on IRC if you have a serious problem.

[woodsmoke]

lol well I ran, as a secondary install, aptosid for several years.

Getting printer dirvers to work and getting codecs on board were well....labourious...lol but they DID work and the setup worked fine, but, although I was welcomed at the forums, I had another username, they are not very much into forum stuff...

I did not use the KDE desktop, and wanted to concentrate on xfce so anyway...

But... since there is now an option for using KDE or KDE lite, and there is a gui for adding codecs, etc. well...

a "quick and dirty" for trying KDE on Debian SID is available with a download! lol

http://duskfire.wordpress.com/2013/0...os-quick-look/

woodsmoke

[dibl]

I install sudo right away and add my account to the wheel group. What alternative do you use?

Alt-F2 "kdesu konsole" is a friend. For running updates, Ctrl-Alt-F1 to the tty console, login "root" and the root password, followed by

service kdm stop

kills all user and X-related processes on a systemd system, so you can run

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

to update your system.

BTW this computer that I'm working on originally had an early 2011 installation of sid, and has been continually updated since then -- it's really not all that tricky to maintain if you observe a few simple common-sense rules.

But how do you handle the freeze, when even Sid sees little activity? That would drive me nuts!

The bug-fixed packages continued to flow into sid as Wheezy stabilized, so it's not as though nothing was happening. But yes, the drama level goes down a lot, and yes, KDE languished at 4.9x for a long while, and then 4.10.2 forever, until a few weeks back when a friend of siduction packaged up 4.10.4 for us, in a special siduction repo.

On the other hand, look at all the drama since the Wheezy release -- yikes! About lost vmware there for a week or so, one day all of the i386 gcc packages were removed, and now phonon:i386 will rip out all of the 64-bit audio packages on a 64-bit system (i.e. no skype for me on this rig!), and as far as I can tell, php5 is still a mess for those who need it (not me). So the weeks and months after a debian release can be a character-building time for sid users.

Yeah, I know "revolutionary" doesn't exactly describe Debian's goals, but still

Well, some days you just want the damned thing to work, so a revolution is not always what you're looking for when you sit down at the keyboard.

[SteveRiley]

and of course the "sudo" thing

It's such a habit for me that even when I'm looking at other distros, I install sudo right away and add my account to the wheel group. What alternative do you use?

Because sid is rolling

But how do you handle the freeze, when even Sid sees little activity? That would drive me nuts!

Last week I installed systemd on this system and it seems to be working fine

systemd and the /usr merge are important, major changes to Linux. Both significantly streamlined Arch. It's time for sysvinit to die. Yeah, I know "revolutionary" doesn't exactly describe Debian's goals, but still

[SteveRiley]

Some estimates have this work being available with KDE 4.12. Hence, we will have to wait patiently.

Martin Graesslin, the maintainer of KWin, writes that we should expect to see an experimental Wayland backend in KWin with the release of 4.11 beta 1.

This made me think that, as the aim for unity was to have it work with Mir in 12 months, KDE was further advanced as Wayland was at version 1.1. It now seems that a considerable lot of work has yet to be done and I hope this proceeds well and I look forward to all the planned improvements. I just have to be patient....... I will be very interested to see if Mir is available in 12 months as this is a totally new area for Canonical to work in.

Wayland is a bigger project than Mir. Wayland, like most other large Linux projects, seeks to maintain some semblance of ABI (application binary interface) stability between releases. It must be distribution-agnostic, so that it can work on any distribution. And it will run an X server as a Wayland client, for backwards compatibility.

Canonical promises none of these for Mir. In fact, they specifically deny any effort to maintain ABI stability. Given that Mir has a smaller scope, which means less work to do, they might get something out the door in a year.

[dibl]

I've been running KDE on Debian Sid for several years now (I have a Kubuntu 13.04 VM too). KDE does indeed look pretty much like KDE on *buntu. The main differences are in the system-setting utilities, the handling of third-party drivers, and of course the "sudo" thing. Because sid is rolling, updates are done at a root tty console, with X shut down, so we don't break X server packages or user-level packages while they are running. Last week I installed systemd on this system and it seems to be working fine -- the faster boot time is not a big deal on a desktop rig, but the laptops do fly to the login greeter. As Steve says, Sid has KDE 4.10.4. Today I'm using the air desktop theme, air-oxygen-color window decoration, and qtcurve style. Here is what it looks like:




Debian is facing the transition to wayland, same as the other distros. I haven't followed that topic closely, but I did observe some wayland-named packages come in to my systems during dist-upgrade last week, so I know that the developers are working on it.