Hi all, On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 5:07 PM, Stéphane Graber <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 03:54:32PM +0100, Jonathan Riddell wrote: >> >> Here's a discussion I half started as part of vUDS. >> >> The switch to Mir in Ubuntu seems pretty risky for the existance of >> Kubuntu, I wonder if other flavours have the same probable problem. >> >> KWin dev has opinions on the subject >> http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/mir-in-kubuntu/ >> From the architecture section on that blog post: >> >> "Mir’s architecture is centered around Unity. It is difficult to really >> understand the architecture of Mir as the specification is so full of >> buzz-words that I don’t understand it [5]. From all I can see and >> understand Unity Next is a combination of window manager and desktop >> shell implemented on top of Mir. How exactly this is going to look >> like I do not know. Anyway it does not fit our design of having >> desktop shell and window manager separated and we do not know whether >> Mir would support that. We also do not know whether Mir would allow >> any other desktop shell except Unity Next, given that this is the main >> target. Wayland on the other hand is designed to have more than one >> compositor implementations. Using KWin as a session compositor is an >> example in the spec." >> >> and on protocol >> >> "But it gets worse, the protocol between Mir server and Mir clients >> is defined as not being stable. In fact it’s promised that it will >> break. That’s a huge problem, I would even call it a showstopper.... >> Given that the protocol may change any time and given that the whole >> thing is developed for the needs of Unity we have to expect that the >> server libraries are not binary compatible or that old version of the >> server libraries cannot talk with the latest client libraries" >> >> Canonical was going to port LightDM to Wayland but now does not plan >> to so someone else would have to do this. KDE might be interested >> but more likely will switch to SDDM. >> >> For Kubuntu the options are: >> - Use Mir - infeasable as upstream can't support it as described above >> - 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. >> >> I don't think there's a public timeline for Mir so we don't know when >> this will hit us, presumably in the next year. >> >> Other flavours I think are this: >> Mythbuntu: not evaluated, hope to do so once NVideo and AMD provide drivers >> Lubuntu: not evaluated, hope to use X and GTK >> ubuntustudio: I've heard both that they use xfce based on xubuntu and >> will follow them, and "aiming for users to choose whatever desktop >> environment they want" >> >> Any other flavours got an opinions? >> >> Are there any misconceptions I have in the above? >> >> Jonathan > > Hi Jonathan, > > Edubuntu currently ships with both Unity and gnome-fallback, so we also have > an > interest in keeping working X sessions for that last one. > > Anyway, my understanding was that Mir would become the system compositor and > act as the main compositor for Unity, but that for the other sessions, one > could simply run X with the Mir driver on top of Mir and then run a standard > accelerated X session (I understand that the accelerated part is still work in > progress at the moment). >
That's exactly right, XMir will wire up X to talk to Mir (in its instance as a system-level compositor). In the final setup, Mir will come up early on in the boot process and act as system-level compositor. User sessions then talk to this system-level Mir instance, including Mir itself. But to state this clearly, XMir will support the X session scenario on top of Mir. HTH, THomas > Might be worth having one of the Unity/Mir guys confirm this though and maybe > get a clearer picture of how that'd work per-session (on a system that ships > both Unity and a non-Mir desktop environment). > > -- > Stéphane Graber > Ubuntu developer > http://www.ubuntu.com > > -- > ubuntu-devel mailing list > [email protected] > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel > -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
