Re:Ubuntu 16.04 Unity 8 current state [video]
by cookiecaper on Thursday December 29, 2016 @12:37PM
(#13278657)
I think the general frustration is not that X is being replaced, rather that practically anything the OSS world does quickly fragments over minor differences, resulting in a very inefficient division of already-scarce labor.
I believe this happens because there is no real unifying force other than good feelings. In a company, people are forced to make reasonable efforts to work together or they imperil their paycheck. In the open-source world, people won't volunteer their time to work on your young project if it doesn't fit their taste profile quite exactly. Since it's rare for that to happen, lots of people spend lots of time re-inventing the same basic stuff and very few people spend time working on the difficult 20% of problems that would yield an 80% improvement in overall experience.
We see this over and over in the open-source world, and it's not without its benefits, but particularly in core underlying components like display servers, it can be very frustrating because you just want everyone to adopt something and move forward. The delays caused by the fragmentation can impair things for years as driver vendors play a "wait and see" game and talented developers look at it and say "Wow, that looks like a mess, I'll stick with Windows for now".
Personally I think Mir is straight up power grab. Canonical said "Why should we be bound by what these Wayland dweebs say? Even if their stuff is great, we are the biggest desktop Ubuntu distribution and we want to be in control. We will make our own display server." It is frustrating on the outside, but I guess you can't argue that it's not in Canonical's interests, and they may indeed end up winning the war (though it didn't work that way with Upstart).
I believe this happens because there is no real unifying force other than good feelings. In a company, people are forced to make reasonable efforts to work together or they imperil their paycheck. In the open-source world, people won't volunteer their time to work on your young project if it doesn't fit their taste profile quite exactly. Since it's rare for that to happen, lots of people spend lots of time re-inventing the same basic stuff and very few people spend time working on the difficult 20% of problems that would yield an 80% improvement in overall experience.
We see this over and over in the open-source world, and it's not without its benefits, but particularly in core underlying components like display servers, it can be very frustrating because you just want everyone to adopt something and move forward. The delays caused by the fragmentation can impair things for years as driver vendors play a "wait and see" game and talented developers look at it and say "Wow, that looks like a mess, I'll stick with Windows for now".
Personally I think Mir is straight up power grab. Canonical said "Why should we be bound by what these Wayland dweebs say? Even if their stuff is great, we are the biggest desktop Ubuntu distribution and we want to be in control. We will make our own display server." It is frustrating on the outside, but I guess you can't argue that it's not in Canonical's interests, and they may indeed end up winning the war (though it didn't work that way with Upstart).