non-Unity flavours and Mir

[Scott Kitterman]

On Friday, June 14, 2013 11:15:17 AM Marc Deslauriers wrote:
> On 13-06-14 11:04 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > On Friday, June 14, 2013 03:54:32 PM 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?
> > 
> > Given that mesa is going to be heavily patched to support Mir, I question
> > the long term feasibility of supporting Wayland in Ubuntu.
> 
> How would adding a new backend to mesa result in it being "heavily
> patched"? Why would adding a new backend to mesa affect the other
> backends, including Wayland?

Upstream kwin tells us they already see bug reports from Kubuntu users due to 
mesa changes to support Unity.  I don't think it's just a new back end.

Scott K