Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bmasci 4719 days ago
Does Mir's existence have anything to do with Wayland's slow development? I read (source unavailable, sorry) that Canonical grew frustrated with Wayland's crawl and decided to make their own.

Again, not sure if this is the case.

4 comments

When Mir was initiated, Wayland's future was not as clear and little was working at all. Instead of talking, Canonical went and just did what they thought is the right way to do it.

You can consider this good (more doing, less talking) or bad (not invented here syndrom).

Actually GNOME shell has a Wayland compositor for around as much time as when Mir was initiated (not when it was announced). The future was also clear. Whatever reason Canonical had to start Mir, it is not related to Wayland.
Wayland developers had to fix all kinds of things elsewere. The development is not slow. One of the Mir developers attributed the quicker speed of Mir to the work that the Wayland developers did. Further, a lot of stuff in Mir is copied/taken from Wayland. E.g. XWayland -> XMir. They did hire the XWayland developer AFAIC. Wayland developers want to release a good version, apparently for XWayland to work well they need some kernel changes or something. XMir is reported to have issues (check e.g. comments on LWN.net, two mouse pointers, etc)
Two mouse pointer is not an issue. It was put there by the developers to quickly determine whether they were running X or XMir.
Wayland requires stuff like KDE (QT) and Gnome (GTK) to be ported to it to be useful.. or to bring their own stuff.

Qt5 now works on Wayland - and KDE has a release coming up (the dev code already works on Wayland)

When Mir was announed, Wayland was already past 1.0. About 60% of the GNOME applications currently run under Wayland. See https://live.gnome.org/Wayland/Applications.

Note that Mir requires the exact same stuff. Just that nobody posted a patch to add such support. It is all distro specific.

Not going to be integrated in upstream KDE in any case, see [1]. I don't think Gnome devs are particularly sanguine about it either.

As for me, I'm waiting for a hypothetical WLMonad.

1: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/mir-in-kubuntu...

If that were the case Canonical could have participated in the development in order to help.
mythical man-month.