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Comment by Morgawr | Hacker News Reader

This is not a business. You don't want to see "competition" (competition in what?)

Variety is nice and having choices is nice, but when there's compatibility and man-hours to be spent in ensuring that compatibility/support across all the possible flavors of Linux distributions, I'm not sure we really want "competition".

It's APIs we are talking about here, standards. How would you feel if there were dozens of TCP/IP protocol standards (not just implementations, mind you) and if you wanted to develop any simple networked application you'd need to write a compatibility layer for each and every one of them?

Competition is definitely not what we need in this case, sorry.

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I would agree with your position only if we could assert that Wayland is the best protocol we can ever have.

But can we affirm that? Can we suppose that there is no way to make a better protocol? What if Mir in the end will become better or will work better or will be more adopted? What if the guys of wayland will fail in making something really good? What if they take some wrong decisions and we will have no alternative in which rely?

We need everywhere competition.

Wayland exists because it was proposed with concrete reasons why X was rubbish and needed replaced.

So everyone said "yes, true, valid, you speak honestly here" and they proceeded to develop Wayland and everyone was on board with transitioning to it when it was ready.

Mir has never produced any arguments for its adoption and has only spread false information claiming why it has merits over Wayland.

Free software will usually jump on any software that can clearly state "this replaces X, for reasons Y, because X is insufficient for purpose in these domains Z and can't be fixed". You get situations where projects like pulse and systemd come under fire over disagreements over what Z domains X is appropriate for, not because there are arguments against Y being lacking functionality.

Wayland at least has (and strictly speaking is) a protocol, you can make a Wayland competitor speaking its protocol. In Mir the protocol is an implementation detail bound to break between versions.

Competition isn't the solution to every problem. Sometimes cooperation is the correct choice.

https://xkcd.com/927/

wayland is less negative about network transparency than mir. I am ALWAYS using network transparency (none of my X clients are running localy). When I am over "slow" network (for example to provide support to Portugal from France), I use vncviewer, but I do not even bother to run the x11vnc command on the same host than the display.

How many key elements of a desktop Linux are there three or four of? How many browsers?

On top of which, everyone is ignoring the Android graphics stack architecture, which is by far the most common Linux-based, open source basis for an interactive userland, with the most apps.

Isn't one of Canonical's stated reasons for doing Mir to be more compatible with Android drivers?

Yes, but Jolla did the same with Wayland. Perhaps Mir is designed to be more "production-ready" for that approach, but it isn't unavailable with Wayland. I have not read the code, but everything I have read about Mir and Wayland tells me you can't slip a dime in the gap between their capabilities. You can, however, fit as much drama as the open source community can generate.

It was, but the way they achieved it was by reusing components Jolla developed for wayland. As it stands I believe their reason for developing Mir is non-technical. It might be that developing Mir increases the company's perceived value for investors.

It's about control (license-wise) over what's going to end up in Ubuntu Phone.

Source: Close friends work at Canonical. No proof, sorry - believe at your own risk.

We have already lost so many years of work in the competition between Gnome and KDE.

OTOH, without competition we wouldn't have had XFCE to retreat to when both GNOME and KDE went weird.

I don't know what you're talking about. I've been using Blackbox/Fluxbox since 1998.

God heavens, why all the bloat, just what is wrong with TWM?

Seriously Canonical needs to market Ubuntu to device manufacturers to generate an income stream. I really hope they succeed although I think it is a shame that they have felt the need to fork the Graphics sub-system in this way.

You would have still had Openbox. And Enlightenment. And Xmonad...

One naked xterm - none of this girly-man "window-manager" rubbish - from which I start every other application, specifying -geometry. If I'm feeling effete that day.

I don't think that that's the case at all.

Even if we ignore the obvious differences in philosophy and implementation between the two, we're better off that they both exist solely because they've acted as hedges for one another.

When KDE 4 was released, it wasn't exactly ready for widespread use. While things did rapidly improve, GNOME at least provided an option for those who wanted a more modern desktop environment than KDE 3.5 in the interim.

The opposite situation has happened more recently. GNOME 3 was a complete disaster at first, and in many ways still is. Many former GNOME 2 users switched to KDE 4, by that time a mature and very usable desktop environment. Since we have seen only minimal effort from the GNOME 3 community to address its severe problems, the existence of KDE has become more critical for more users.

Do you remember how stagnant GCC was before Clang came along?

gcc is not a standard though, it's a product. It's a bit different in this case and I totally agree with you.

Well, that's mincing words. GCC is as much of a standard and/or product as Wayland or X are.

It is an implementation of the C, C++ etc standards, and it was also, for long, the canonical such implementation on Linux and Open Source OSes.

GCC wasn't stagnant at all. There were relatively frequent major releases including ports to additional platforms, very good progress implementing stuff like C++11, better optimizations, and many other important improvements.

Clang has helped show some additional areas where GCC could perhaps be improved, but GCC was surely not "stagnant" at the time. It wasn't like during the EGCS situation in the 1990s.

I remember how stagnant it was before EGCS came along, that's how old I am. :) EGCS was clearly technically superior to GCC (at least in some ways), and when the FSF gave up or came to its senses then the EGCS and mainline GCC projects were re-merged. (Compare also the Rails/Merb fork/re-merge.) By contrast, no-one outside Canonical seems convinced that Mir has important technical advantages over Wayland, and (as far as I've heard) Canonical seems to have little interest in preventing or minimising balkanisation, so it's hard to see the justification. The more efficient way for Canonical to speed up or shake up Wayland would seem to be to contribute to it, or failing that to maintain a fork designed to be a candidate for full or partial re-merging, no?

(I am not an expert on anything.)

I guess we don't need BSD either then (or the other way around). And directx. And so on. One tech standard to rule them all!

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