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

[NoWorries]

Looks like it that Datamation is at it again in complaining about the direction of ubuntu and the recent criticism. You will find the article The Burning Bridges of Ubuntu contains statements such as:

Meanwhile, elections for the Community Council, which is supposed to be Ubuntu's governing body, were apparently such low priority that they were held a month after the last Council's term of office expired. According to longtime Ubuntu volunteer Elizabeth Krumbach, the delay was due to "waiting on Mark [Shuttleworth]," Ubuntu's and Canonical's founder.

Clearly, the community discontent that has been simmering for the past year has not cooled. Recently, developer Aaron Toponce withdrew from his Ubuntu-related activity because of Canonical's actions. Long-time volunteer Benjamin Kerensa replied by calling for an Ubuntu Foundation that would be independent of Canonical, arguing that it was the only way to preserve the Ubuntu community.

The article goes on to comment about the disagreement between the KDE community and Canonical regarding Wayland and Mir.

The final two paragraphs are worth noting:

Even more seriously, he shows no signs of being aware of how far Canonical and Ubuntu have strayed from the norms of community in free software. Too often, he sounds impatient with any perspective other than his own.

Considering that Canonical has gone nine years without a profit, such self-absorption is understandable. All the same, if Canonical's and Ubuntu's leaders would hire a crisis manager to oversee their internal and external responses, they could make life far easier for themselves.

It would be great if Canonical and our SABDFL followed the norms of the free software community. Bridge building rather than bridge burning is more in order, but I will wait and see how the next year goes.

Meanwhile I hope "Kubuntu" gets better press than it has at the moment. While there have been some reviews of Kubuntu 13.10, I have yet to see one on Linux Today that describes how to install it and all the applications. They have done this previously but for some reason not now.

[claydoh]

IMO, Shuttlesworth has created both Unity and Mir because he wanted to control their development stack from bottom to top and not be dependent on others for parts of either. From his POV, and goal to make Ubuntu profitable, it makes sense.

I also see that they give him an opportunity to create a wall between Ubuntu and other distros, especially those which don't adopt either Mir or Unity, by tying Mir and Unity together. In other words, he is building a "walled garden" in which he can capitalize financially on Ubuntu's (former?) popularity. IMO, it will be his Achilles heel. As I said before, Canonical wasn't able to significantly penetrate the MS hegemony and it is too late for the tablet/smartphone market. There is no incentive for a significant number of OEMs to offer the platform on their devices, or for a single OEM to make a significant number of them. But he's still trying.

This assumes that the urge to have an income is a pure, profit grabbing move by Canonical, as opposed to creating a self-sustaining environment for Ubuntu and developers, etc. After nearly a decade, where has all this money?

I think it is much, much simpler. The real issue is that Canonical have never learned how to properly participate in various parts of the linux ecosphere, which quite often has a distinct aversion to things outside of their own boxes. Goals and needs diverge, etc on top of the resentment that has always been present towards things Ubuntu.

(lolol I keep sounding like a fanboi or apologist here. Far from it. Just either get tired of or find amusing, depending on the day, how stupidly overblown, over-analyzed, over-sensationalized and over-zealous all this mostly childish stuff is on all sides)

Ooooh had an interesting thought:
Most distros start at the kernel level and work their way outward to a desktop environment of some sort. Those DEs are tweaked or slightly modified, but otherwise the work on them is done more or less outside of the distros. The DE is "upstream" from the distro.

Ubuntu more or less has always started at the desktop level, and work inward as necessary. So in a sense, before unity, the DE was never the "upstream", perhaps across the stream.

Other than helping to perhaps define how and why things have become so silly, it means nothing probably. I am just in awe of my own rare flashes of true insight and clarity, completely unencumbered by the thought process

[GreyGeek]

Maybe it's a dumb question but why Mir? Why couldn't Shuttleworth just use Wayland in its "plataform integrated project"? Is there some serious technical issue that really prevents it?

Wikipedia has two good articles explaining both Mir and Unity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_%28software%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_%28user_interface%29

IMO, Shuttlesworth has created both Unity and Mir because he wanted to control their development stack from bottom to top and not be dependent on others for parts of either. From his POV, and goal to make Ubuntu profitable, it makes sense.

I also see that they give him an opportunity to create a wall between Ubuntu and other distros, especially those which don't adopt either Mir or Unity, by tying Mir and Unity together. In other words, he is building a "walled garden" in which he can capitalize financially on Ubuntu's (former?) popularity. IMO, it will be his Achilles heel. As I said before, Canonical wasn't able to significantly penetrate the MS hegemony and it is too late for the tablet/smartphone market. There is no incentive for a significant number of OEMs to offer the platform on their devices, or for a single OEM to make a significant number of them. But he's still trying.

If Debian doesn't adopt Mir and Unity, and I doubt that they will, preferring Wayland, Gnome and KDE instead, then as the wall gets higher and higher distros will have to choose which base they want to derive from. I'm wagering that most will go with Debian. Of those that don't, the most popular will continue being based off of SUSE or RH.

Regardless, Shuttlesworth set the spring of 2017 as the end of his first 5 year LTS because, I believe, he will close Canonical if his dreams of making Canonical profitable (in terms of comparing it to other investments he could make) have not be realized. Hence my prediction, following his announcement of the termination of support for Kubuntu and the 5 year LTS of 12.04, that it signals a deadline he has set.

Comparing distros is like comparing wives or husbands. To each his/her own. I've never used Unity and only played with it briefly so I can't speak to it in any significant way. But, my son's new System76 Gazelle has it and when I asked him if he wanted me to replace it with a KDE based distro he said no. He likes it. He says it was easy to learn and it does what he wants it to do. I told him if he ever gets hungry for real desktop power and ease of use he knows where the download sites are!

[whatthefunk]

I also think that Canonical wants more control of its distro. They ditched Gnome for Unity, Wayland for Mir, and are working on Click package management. I think their ideal is to have everything in Canonical's hands.

[claydoh]

Maybe it's a dumb question but why Mir? Why couldn't Shuttleworth just use Wayland in its "plataform integrated project"? Is there some serious technical issue that really prevents it?

Speculating a bit here as I am not sure how much info is out there, but 2 things come to mind:

Mobile device support
and
The pace of development

Without making any judgment on Mir or Wayland, I don't think Wayland's pace (on the slow side )
fits with Ubuntu's ambitions (more focus on mobile, and the desire to get it sooner).



Sent from my dlx using Tapatalk

[geoaraujo]

Mir wont be in 14.04 either.

Maybe it's a dumb question but why Mir? Why couldn't Shuttleworth just use Wayland in its "plataform integrated project"? Is there some serious technical issue that really prevents it?

[NoWorries]

Mir wont be in 14.04 either.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubunt...t-401713.shtml

Thanks very much for the update. I have always suspected that Mir may be late and I have been hoping that Wayland is first to get out of the starting gate. I just did a quick search for find when Wayland is likely to be incorporated into KDE and Phoronix gives the date as being for Kubuntu 14.10. Lets hope they make it.

[whatthefunk]

Mir wont be in 14.04 either.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubunt...t-401713.shtml

[whatthefunk]

Samsung is now backing Wayland as well.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Wayla...g-399326.shtml

[Rog132]

Did Xubuntu and Lubuntu decided to adopt Mir?

kubuntu-devel mailing list : https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/kubuntu-devel
--> non-Unity flavours and Mir : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ku...ay/006992.html

and

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

[geoaraujo]

Kubuntu (and several other Ubuntu based distros) decided NOT to jump on the Mir/XMir bandwagon like Shuttlesworth had hoped, and the rant was the result.

Did Xubuntu and Lubuntu decide to adopt Mir?

[GreyGeek]

Mir vs. Wayland, SADFL's rants and apparent slide into insanity, etc.

Don't ask me: https://blogs.kde.org/2013/06/26/kub...ng-mir-or-xmir

That link was back in June. Kubuntu (and several other Ubuntu based distros) decided NOT to jump on the Mir/XMir bandwagon like Shuttlesworth had hoped, and the rant was the result.

[Fintan]

I found this today:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/KDE-a...n-396651.shtml

I guess this is just the tip of the info iceberg.

[Rog132]

Why long threads are from #¤%&...

Earlier: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...l=1#post330217


http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2013/06/18...el.html#t11:15

Riddell mgraesslin: so my current thinking is we expect kubuntu 14.04LTS to have KWin on X and for 14.10 we can see if switching to wayland is ready using packages synced from debian 11:15

mgraesslin yes

http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2013/06/19...el.html#t05:45

tvoss mgraesslin, hmm, that would be great as we have a working qpa implementation for Mir. Do you have some ballpark estimate for the qt5 switch? 05:45

mgraesslin when master opens up again - in a few weeks 05:46
mgraesslin we plan to have a development preview release this year 05:46
mgraesslin for Kubuntu the earliest release on Qt 5 can be 14.10, maybe 15.04 05:47
mgraesslin 14.04 will come 4.11 just like 13.10 05:47

The game plan for the Kubuntu 14.04 /1/ is to use the KWin on X with the KDE 4. After that ...


More links

/1/ Trusty Tahr: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...l=1#post337565

[geoaraujo]

Will the next Kubuntu upgrade to be the very first one that is going to represent such a major modification (changing a display server protocol)? I'm also deeply concerned about that. Correct if I'm wrong, but I think it has the potencial to break all the existing installs. Sure, every upgrade has potencial to do so, but the next one seems to especially risky.