[tjdetwiler]

This is something Canonical should have considered before developing they're own display server. The community attitude from the start seems to generally be "we won't carry support upstream", so this doesn't seem unreasonable.

[tinco]

Who's saying Canonical hasn't considered this? If this truly reflects the community attitude towards a new open source project than that is an awful thing.

No one is saying it, but Wayland is just a display server, and worse, it's just a display server that's been developed on by just one guy in what is clearly his spare time. For years, and it's still not something we can readily use.

If instead of Canonical this was just a random dude with a kickstarter project, promising that if he built this something new he would get NVidia and AMD in on it we'd all be cheering them on.

We want a replacement for X. Wether it's Wayland or Mir, the community shouldn't care. If both of them grow up to be great display servers, then the projects can have their choice. Why make that choice now, when Mir isn't anything yet, and Wayland looks like an infinite road to nowhere?

So there you have it, a bad comment about Wayland. Why? Because I'm frustrated. X has been a pain in our collective asses for so many years, and the project that was going to change that receives almost no support. It's just this one guy going at it. No vendor support, no distro support. No one wants to touch it, so it takes 5 years to get to this point where it seems like it's almost ready for adoption, but still no one builds a desktop environment for it or any vendor interest.

Then a company just goes for it, allocates significant resources to it, and even uses its connections and leverage to get vendors in on it, and makes sure there's going to be a desktop environment for it. And the whole community just goes 'boo!'? what is that about?

What's the community got to lose? Why is it hurt? What has it invested in wayland?

I'll say it. Nothing. Just some code some dude made that's possibly going to be obsolete if Canonical succeeds. And if not, then Canonical made some obsolete code, which is their business risk, not ours to judge over.

If you ask me, the community should be positive. What have we got to gain? A possible X successor that's got multi-vendor support and a desktop environment that works. It's going to have a nice interface, takes up a lot of design clues from wayland and generally is going to kick ass if it works out.

[cookiecaper]

I'm not sure why, but you seem unaware of the massive community effort that has already been plowed into Wayland and the massive loss of credibility the community suffers when it's wishy-washy about display infrastructure without Very Good Reasons. Qt and GTK have already been mostly ported, driver code has been contributed in various projects over the last 2-3 years, and other major efforts have been invested into Wayland to break the iron hand of X11, and then Canonical ignorantly struts along with Mir and jeopardizes the whole thing.

If we want big hardware players like nvidia and intel to take us seriously, we must behave in a professional manner, and one of the biggest players in the space creating an incompatible fork on such a fundamental piece of architecture five years after a similar project began making inroads, basically because "We don't have anyone smart enough to understand Wayland", is _not_ professional.

Maybe this would've been justified after Wayland support went mainstream, but all Canonical has accomplished by the release and announcement of Mir is the further entrenchment of X11 by accentuating what a horrendous wreck it is to attempt to remove it.