On Jun 14, 2013 7:55 AM, "Jonathan Riddell" <<a href="mailto:jriddell@ubuntu.com">jriddell@ubuntu.com</a>> 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 <a href="http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/mir-in-kubuntu/">http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/mir-in-kubuntu/</a> > 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 > > -- I have nothing to add about the difficulties Kubuntu feels like they may face with Mir. I'm optimistic that a call could be setup to hash out some of the concerns surrounding Mir in Kubuntu. I'm sure Canonical will help along the way.