On Jun 14, 2013 7:55 AM, "Jonathan Riddell" <jriddell@ubuntu.com> 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
>
> --
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.
