Wayland is a protocol, Mir will use this protocol, I think you are not uptodate with what is happening here.

What does Mir offer compared to Weston? It still sounds pretty NIH.

Nobody uses Weston, Weston is like the reference thing, each DE is implementing their own compositor. Some DE like Mate hope they can use Mir and so get an easy way to add Wayland support. Ubuntu uses Gnome now so they use Mutter for wayland, Mir would be use for IoT and other non desktop platforms nd there is the possibility that others DE would use it.

I don't think the guy who posted this works for Canonical at the moment. If he does, his launchpad page is very sparse compared to other employees. I'm not saying that to disparage him in any way, but because it would make it incompatible with a not-invented-here syndrome.

I think Mir should be looked at as an independent project now. I might be wrong, of course, but that's the impression I have.

https://github.com/MirServer/mir/commits?author=gerboland https://launchpad.net/~gerboland https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mir-Now-...

Even given that Mir is independent, it sounds like people are continuing to work on it because they have already invested in working on it. I've yet to hear of any users.

I agree, I'm not saying it's useful in a sense other than academic/historic. I was only reacting to "NIH". I guess you might be arguing that Mir continues as a consequence of nostalgia from an original not-invented-here syndrome.

I won't argue with that :-P

That said, if the guy who posted this is not employed by Canonical (like I speculated), and has _never_ been employed by Canonical, I would like to further speculate that either (a) he's doing this in order to specifically gain favor with Canonical employees and increase his chances of employment there later, or (b) to increase his chances of employment at any of the "big Linux players", or (c) to increase his knowledge of the X/wayland ecosystem and C coding in general.

All of which sound like good investments on his part.

Anyway that's speculation upon speculation, obviously, but if I was a professor at a generic I.T. bachelor/masters, this is exactly what I'd tell my students to do in their spare time (and if they could weave it into related classwork, all the better obviously).

If I understand correctly, they'll drop the server part replacing it with Wayland. But they'll keep their compositor, which any Wayland based DE needs to implement anyway. They don't intended it for the desktop, since they are dropping Unity. It's for IoT and etc.

I hardly think that Mutter is the be-all and end-all of Wayland compositor performance. I could see Ubunu plumbing a re-moulded Mir back into their distribution further down the line (while keeping the rest of the GNOME environment). I'm not certain on the technical details, but I believe this should be possibly; for Wayland was certainly designed with compositor agnosticism in mind.

Edit: reading further, it appears that GNOME Shell is quite tightly woven into Mutter, which may well complicate matters.

GNOME devs realized already that they have problems with the current architecture, I think X got the blame though this time too, so they plan a GNOME4 version, I do not know if they started coding it or are just in planing phase.

They can't replace something with Wayland because Wayland is a protocol and interface, Mir needs to implement code to speak that protocol.

OK, then they are replacing the compositor and changing their client, rewriting it to talk in Wayland protocol.

They are no removing a Mir component and add a Wayland component, they implement the Wayland protocol on top of existing code, maybe refactoring where it is needed, so Mir could talk wayland and still do the Mir stuff that is needed for IoT.