[XorNot]

People get paid to develop Mir. They're a limited resource in open source - paid developers are the ones who can drive projects, fix tricky bugs and take on big features. They also wind up being gatekeepers to contributions.

At the time Mir was announced what I heard and what a lot of others heard was "Ubuntu's paid developer resources with relevant expertise are being diverted from Wayland".

Replacing X is sorely needed in the Linux desktop space, and it's a huge project. So big that unless it's frightfully mismanaged then it's extremely dubious what a split in development effort is going to accomplish. And what did it accomplish? I have absolutely no idea what Mir actually shipped that was usable. I have no idea what they were doing substantially differently and why that was good (something about convergence by using bionic so it ran on Android too I think?) And I do remember Canonical at the time arguing they would beat Wayland to something usable... But here we are, I'm still using X, my video payback still tears, and I can't for the life of me think how the Linux desktop has benefited.

I suppose Cinnamon got created and I now run that on top of others vanilla Ubuntu?

[juliangoldsmith]

Wayland is actually fairly usable at this point, though some programs are buggy. With aliases to run problematic programs in X, it'd probably work quite well.