Mir, the next generation of X

[Andrew Cowie]

On Thu, 2013-03-14 at 00:17 -0400, Antonio Sun wrote:


> Please comment. 

Canonical is at it again. It doesn't really matter that they think they
can do well. It's that they're doing it by themselves, rather than as a
part of the [existing] community.

I'd encourage you to watch 
http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/mp4/The_real_story_behind_Wayland_and_X.mp4
which is the recording of a talk Daniel Stone gave at LCA this year,
http://lca2013.linux.org.au/schedule/30256/view_talk?day=friday

Most of the talk is describing all the things that have piled up as a
result of ~4 decades of decisions in the design and implementation of
the X server. I'll apologize for encouraging you to watch something
where there are lots of interjections from the audience that didn't make
it to the audio track, but the room was full of X hackers, notably Kieth
Packard [X.org] and Carl Worth [cairo graphics]. I think that Linus guy
was there, too.

The end result is that [people who would know] having described all of
X's shortcomings, they then describe what Wayland *is*. It didn't take
very long. Wow. I can't wait.

You can draw your own conclusions, but it's pretty impressive when
people can step back from their work, learn from it, and head in a new
direction. I'm sure Canonical will have fun writing Mir, but they're not
going to have much help from the rest of us.

AfC
Sydney

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