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posted by n1 on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the politics dept.

After announcing his company was abandoning Unity for GNOME, Shuttleworth posted a thank-you note to the Unity community Friday on Google Plus, but added on Saturday:

"I used to think that it was a privilege to serve people who also loved the idea of service, but now I think many members of the free software community are just deeply anti-social types who love to hate on whatever is mainstream. When Windows was mainstream they hated on it. Rationally, Windows does many things well and deserves respect for those. And when Canonical went mainstream, it became the focus of irrational hatred too. The very same muppets would write about how terrible it was that IOS/Android had no competition and then how terrible it was that Canonical was investing in (free software!) compositing and convergence. Fuck that shit."

"The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance. We have a problem in the community when people choose to hate free software instead of loving that someone cares enough to take their life's work and make it freely available."

Shuttleworth says that "I came to be disgusted with the hate" on Canonical's display server Mir, saying it "changed my opinion of the free software community."

Full story here.


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  • (Score: 2, Flamebait) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:45AM (11 children)

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:45AM (#492067) Journal

    No Mr. Shuttleworth. Announcing Mir a full year after Wayland was announced while borrowing parts from it creating YET ANOTHER incompatible layer of software was irrational. It reeked of NIH and was ridiculed as much as Wayland was for the same reason: we already had a working display server, X.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:35AM (10 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:35AM (#492089)

      The problem is that X doesn't really work that well for modern uses. It's archaic and has a lot of problems, such as tearing. That's why they came up with Wayland in the first place. Moreover, the people who came up with Wayland were the very same people working on (modern) X, people like Keith Packard, the people who fixed a lot of problems with X and made it usable for the Linux desktop. It's not like Wayland was made by some competing group of developers.

      I don't know enough about Wayland to really comment on its technical specs and design, but given that the apparent X experts seem to be the ones who created it and pushed it, I have to assume that it can't be all bad. The problem with Mir is that it absolutely did reek of NIH as you said, and it created more fragmentation and confusion in a space (low-level infrastructure software) where there really needs to be standardization for desktop Linux to survive and succeed.

      • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:02AM (7 children)

        by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:02AM (#492101) Journal

        I was merely pointing out the fact that both projects were ridiculed. I remember the flame war on /. when Wayland was announced. How many people shat upon it because of the fact that it completely ignored network transparency preferring 3rd party protocols like VNC and RDP was insane.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:21AM (6 children)

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:21AM (#492108)

          To be fair, I think the Wayland team could have done a lot better there by addressing people's concerns. Network transparency is an important feature to many people, and it should have been included from the outset, by some means. If that means just adopting RDP and calling it done, then that's fine, just make sure the concern is addressed. It really seemed like they didn't even want to address it until people were screaming.

          • (Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:03AM (2 children)

            by sjames (2882) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:03AM (#492120) Journal

            Personally the part that bothered me the most was when they started denying that X had the capability rather than concede that people used it and wanted it.

            • (Score: 2) by tekk on Friday April 14 2017, @05:31PM (1 child)

              by tekk (5704) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 14 2017, @05:31PM (#494092)

              To be fair when I saw the actual devs explaining it they were explaining how X didn't really/b do network transparency. The modern X stack stopped using actual X drawing commands when motif died, so all that "network transparent" X does these days is sling around big inefficient bitmaps rather than small X commands. Essentially it's equivalent to VNC but less efficient because iirc X doesn't actually compress the bitmaps it sends over the wire.

              • (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday April 14 2017, @06:39PM

                by sjames (2882) on Friday April 14 2017, @06:39PM (#494141) Journal

                Sure, but they were awfully reluctant to admit that that was what they meant. They knew damned well that whatever was done locally (which was bitmaps) could be as easily done over the network. Of course, you could get compression using ssh.

                Kinda like when Homer Simpson pawned his TV.

                Pawn Broker: Is it cable ready?

                Homer: Ready as she'll ever be!

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:13AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:13AM (#492123)

            It comes with RDP, yes. And I think X11, but I haven't played with it.

            Seeing as how this keeps coming up time and time and time again, they didn't do a good job communicating that.

            Now it's one of those tribal positions that Wayland has no support for even VNC, or something.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:18AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:18AM (#492154)

            That put me off. Wayland is still important, but the bashing of everything X was just offensive. I was one of those users of network transparency. Yeah, it isn't perfect in all conceivable cases, but at the end of the day I got what I wanted out of it... a lot more than what they were offering.

          • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:30PM

            by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:30PM (#492305) Journal

            From memory, the Wayland team originally stated that network transparency was never a consideration from the start and that they would investigate that in the future once the core was stable. I can get behind that because trying to satisfy every single use case including niche cases would infect the project with feature creep. Though, they weren't specific about alternatives and even left a feeling of "if you need it bad enough, build it yourself" implying that any remote display support would have to be handled by the community as a 3rd party project. That was the part that didn't sit well. But those were the early days and no one at the time was sure about the projects future.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:31AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:31AM (#492134)

        Things like XCB or SYNC extension were created, yet we have to do them over again. And other things that were also impossible seem to be proving perfectly possible, because the issue is with the code, not the protocol. Xpra and firejail give you reconnects and security so other programs can't poke at the server... things "experts" claimed were insolvable and required a full rewrite.

        FOSS has clearly gone from volunteer to corporate in last ~20 years, and then jobs must be justified. MS & Apple are in a similar place, BTW, they have to "invent" all kind of new crap. It's hard to admit things are mostly done and the last things are hard and not very profitable.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:43PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:43PM (#492246)
          How is firejail with xpra working for you? I tried it when firejail first started supporting xpra, but my main use case was jailing a web browser, and it was too slow to play even SD youtube video without stuttering.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:46AM

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:46AM (#492068)

    Like sports fans... Cam High North sucks, only Cam High West rules! Modern tribalism, because we're low on real wars.

    Nobody was forced by anyone to use Wayland or Mir or X. Don't like it? Pick another of 600 distros... Some of which have 99% of the same components, except the one you don't want.
    I couldn't stand Unity, so I run Mint Cinnamon. No need to insult anyone about it, especially Canonical, which makes and freely distributes most of the stuff under that hood.

  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:49AM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:49AM (#492069)

    Yes, it's very strange that free software advocates would dislike non-free proprietary user-subjugating software like Windows, and be upset that Ubuntu comes with proprietary software. This guy is probably just an "open source" proponent who doesn't care much about the ethical aspect of the matter, which would explain his confusion.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:51AM (7 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:51AM (#492070)
      Mir is GPLv3, which is about as non-proprietary as it gets.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:08AM (6 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:08AM (#492102)

        Except I wasn't talking about Mir, but Ubuntu in general. Ubuntu tolerates proprietary software and includes it. You know, since he spoke about how Windows and Canonical got hate once they went mainstream, as if that's the actual reason. But ignore that part.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:23AM (5 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:23AM (#492110)
          You can rip all of the proprietary software out of Ubuntu and still have a very much usable system if your hardware does not require any non-Free drivers.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:28AM (3 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:28AM (#492111)

            Irrelevant. It's bad enough that they include proprietary software; they have to set an example by not doing so. By tolerating non-free software, they show that they are not truly opposed to it and therefore are not friends to the free software community. Just being better than Microsoft and their ilk is not enough.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:15AM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:15AM (#492124)

              Not friends to RMS, you mean.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:56AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:56AM (#492149)

                No, to the free software community. Free software advocates see proprietary software as unethical. For "open source" advocates, that may or may not be the case. That's the main reason for using the term "free software".

            • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:19PM

              by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:19PM (#492366) Journal

              Even Debian tolerates non-free software. They may discourage it, but they still tolerate it. And, depending on your precise definition of free, they even have some in their repositories.

              --
              Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
          • (Score: 2) by EETech1 on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:05AM

            by EETech1 (957) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:05AM (#492143)

            Debian?

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:20AM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:20AM (#492078)

      -1 Stupid. Mir wasn't proprietary, it was GPL and just as open-source and FOSS as anything else.

      The objection was that it was contributing to Linux fragmentation for a critical low-level infrastructural component, and creating more unnecessary work for downstream projects such as KDE/Qt and Gnome/Gtk+ which need to talk to the display server.

  • (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:15AM (19 children)

    by stormwyrm (717) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:15AM (#492075) Journal

    This is something I have never really understood. If they can make a better Free Software display server than X11 then it will catch on, and we’ll all be better for it. If they want to consume their developer cycles by creating a third competing display server beside X11 and Wayland then that’s up to them. The only real concern is their licensing. While Mir is under GPLv3, any contributors, while not obliged to make copyright assignment to Canonical, have to sign an agreement that grants Canonical the right to relicense their contributions as they see fit. Meaning they can dual-license Mir if they so choose and they have permission from all contributors to do so. The ability to do this is probably the main driver behind their decision to behind Mir vs. Wayland. This is a concern, but still there isn’t anything Canonical can do to stop anyone from simply taking their code and forking it, and it will affect their ability to attract third-party developer mindshare.

    Free Software gives us choices, and I’d rather have choices than lack them.

    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:29AM (17 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:29AM (#492083)

      As I said in a post above: the objection was that it was contributing to Linux fragmentation for a critical low-level infrastructural component, and creating more unnecessary work for downstream projects such as KDE/Qt and Gnome/Gtk+ which need to talk to the display server.

      It's not trivial to make something like Qt communicate properly with a display server, and adding yet another one in there just adds more work for those developers. If they don't do it, then their software won't work very well on systems which use that display server. In the old days, this wasn't hard: everyone used X, so that was the single standard all graphical applications or toolkits had to work with that. Then along came Wayland, which promised to be better and more modern in multiple ways. But then came Canonical with their own, incompatible Mir, so now devs had 3 different display servers to work with and test code for.

      This isn't like some top-level application program that you can either take or leave.

      The problem isn't the licensing, the problem is that just like we only generally work with a single kernel (the Linux kernel), no one wants to work with multple display servers. People, for very good reason, want standardization for low-level infrastructure components. Fragmentation (at that level) is not helping the cause for Linux adoption; it just adds more work for developers, which means less time available to make things work well and actually compete with other platforms (namely Windows and Mac).

      Free Software gives us choices, and I’d rather have choices than lack them.

      There's a such thing as too many choices. A display server that no one uses and no one supports isn't very helpful, but when a major distro uses it, then that demands attention, attention which draws from other important work. Ignoring it means your software won't work on that distro. This is a prime example of why standardization in FOSS is important. Having lots of choices for text editors is fine; having lots of choices for desktop environments is a little more problematic, but still not that bad since they all generally run each other's applications; having lots of choices for display servers and other low-level infrastructure is a giant problem. You'll never get a working Linux desktop if you can't standardize on the display server.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:45AM (16 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:45AM (#492092)

        Agreed. Standards matter because when they are adopted, they remove complexity, improve interoperability, reduce the learning curve, and result in more system stability because more programmers can focus their development efforts on the same code.

        Linux (the OS) only got to where it is today because it was an implementation (almost totally) of the well-defined POSIX standard. Think about that.

        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Mykl on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:19AM (15 children)

          by Mykl (1112) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:19AM (#492107)

          So, what's the alternative? Should everyone just settle for whoever has the first-mover advantage in low-level software, regardless of the relative merits of each solution? Should all FOSS projects be equal, though some more equal than others?

          I agree that standards do make things much easier for everyone. However, deciding on and implementing a standard will always be much more straightforward and less painful under an organisational hierarchy. While the FOSS model will ultimately decide a standard or standards through community usage (hopefully based on merit, but you never know...), you have to accept that the path to doing so will be more messy and painful.

          I would not want to see Mir ditched just because it will make things hard for a few people for a while. I'd rather it lives or dies on its own merits. If it's a better solution, then the FOSS ecosystem as a whole will be ultimately better off for it.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:31AM (7 children)

            by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:31AM (#492113)

            Should all FOSS projects be equal, though some more equal than others?

            Unfortunately, yes. What would you think if some small group decided to fork the Linux kernel, and make a different kernel that wasn't fully compatible, and then demanded that everyone write their software to work on that kernel too? And look at all the hoopla over systemd adoption (and at least there, most software isn't affected by the init system, only other low-level system services). There's a reason there's been a lot of pushes to try to standardize certain elements of the Linux/FOSS software stack, such as with LSB: fragmentation causes more problems than it solves. We should have learned this lesson long ago: the whole reason UNIX died is because of fragmentation. Windows came along offering a single, standard platform for high-end software vendors, and they all ended up abandoning UNIX because they could write one version for Win32 and be done, instead of having to write 5-10 different versions for UNIXes.

            Should everyone just settle for whoever has the first-mover advantage in low-level software, regardless of the relative merits of each solution?

            Remember too that Wayland wasn't the invention of some small group of outsiders: it was the product of the de facto group of FOSS display stack experts, the people who were already giving us X and the many important extensions to it which were badly needed for desktop Linux to work. Sorry if that sounds like an appeal to authority, but that team had already proven its worth and importance to the community with their X.org work, so it's perfectly reasonable that a small team from a single company acting against this standardization effort, in an apparent display of NIH, were shunned.

            • (Score: 5, Informative) by MadTinfoilHatter on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:07AM (4 children)

              by MadTinfoilHatter (4635) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:07AM (#492153)

              at least there, most software isn't affected by the init system

              Don't worry. The systemd devs are working hard on fixing that. [debian.org]

              • (Score: 5, Informative) by rleigh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:33AM (3 children)

                by rleigh (4887) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:33AM (#492183) Homepage

                That's a shame to see. But, there are two separate issues in that bug:

                1) A gratuitous dependency of procps on libsystemd
                2) The requirement to mount a separate /usr (if any) in the initramfs

                The first is the real problem, dragging in unnecessary library dependencies in a minimalistic core tool. Extended functionality should likely be in a separate tool, or dynamically loaded from a module.

                The latter was done ages ago (by me) when I was maintaining sysvinit, and is independent of any init system in use. There are numerous long-standing issues with mounting /usr part way through the init sequence, and this resolves all of them. It was done so that it would continue to work properly for all users, irrespective of their init system, with the exception of users *not* using an initramfs who were mounting a separate /usr. This subset of the userbase is vanishingly small. You can continue to boot without an initramfs if /usr is on /. And you can continue to use a separate /usr so long as you use an initramfs. It's the combination of the two that's not supported (separate /usr and no initramfs). I did a lot of work to make this minimally disruptive--you can even mount separate / and /usr from NFS in the initramfs. Even a separate encrypted /etc.

                • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:37PM (2 children)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:37PM (#492343)

                  Back when I maintained procps, it only depended on libc. It didn't even trust libc very much. It was prepared for some kinds of kernel bug that could hang it, producing output until hitting the kernel problem. When I was asked to support SELinux, I insisted on doing so without the external library.

                  I gave up maintaining it. Sorry. I got a full-time job and had 10 kids. I also couldn't really deal with Red Hat hacking in incompatible changes, such as stealing command option letters that were reserved for other things. One can't say "no" to a distribution that is able to patch your code with piles of shit.

                  Now you know another way that free software projects die.

                  -- Albert Cahalan

                  • (Score: 1) by DBeemer on Friday April 14 2017, @09:18AM

                    by DBeemer (6398) on Friday April 14 2017, @09:18AM (#493890)

                    So you had 2 kids?

                  • (Score: 2) by rleigh on Friday April 14 2017, @06:52PM

                    by rleigh (4887) on Friday April 14 2017, @06:52PM (#494149) Homepage

                    I'm in the same situation with some of my own software, and it was one of the reasons I ended up dropping sysvinit maintenance in Debian, and quitting the project entirely (RSI was the primary reason). As a lone volunteer, there's little a single person can do when faced with the juggernaut of paid commercial developers ramming their changes in. Times have changed a lot since free software development in the '90s. I don't like where things have ended up going.

                    Right now, I'm in the same situation as the tmux developers. My stuff won't work on a "modern" Linux system properly because it falls foul of the systemd session management and mount namespaces. But I don't really want to hack in special support logic and dependencies upon junk like libsystemd. Not just because it compromises the portability and maintainability, but also because I object to the necessity of "fixing" perfectly working code just because a bunch of people decided to break decades old systems programming contracts. I don't think breaking POSIX is at all acceptable, and I've moved more and more to FreeBSD as a result. If I had the same cavalier attitude to basic systems compatibility in my day job, I'd be fired for reckless incompetence, yet RedHat permit this as the foundation of their flagship enterprise product.

            • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:45PM (1 child)

              by VLM (445) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:45PM (#492247)

              the whole reason UNIX died is because of fragmentation

              That sounds very retcon-ish having lived thru that era the problem was tying hardware to software (before windows all OS came from your hardware mfgr just like OSX today) and both upfront cost and support costs were milked until people hated the OS provider. Also no security patches.

              Back in the days before package managers and GNU autoconf and all that, it still wasn't all that much work to compile C from one machine on another. There was a lot of stupid address width assumptions in the old days. Also floating point was weird.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:25AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:25AM (#492566)

                Agreed. Commercial Unix died because it was FAR more expensive (SW & RISC workstation HW were tied together) than Windows and PCs, and PCs running the new Windows NT were becoming more capable. That's it.
                In the heyday of commercial Unix, software vendors happily developed their star product for only one or two Unix variants. This was back when only Unix HW & SW were up to the task.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:33AM (3 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:33AM (#492158)

            The solution, I think, is to accept the fact that plays like this are going to face criticism. If the play is in fact a good one, then arguments or experiments should show it. Don't forget this is Mark Shuttleworth, who has a history of responding poorly to criticism. It may be that his problem is he can't separate the rational criticism from the insults. Or he may be incapable of dealing with criticism.

            I think Mir would have been bad for the community if it caught on the way PulseAudio (aka ESD¹) did. It was fine until people started targeting PA, which we're stuck with now. Mir also had some worrying aspects, I forget what now, but if it was a requirement I think we'd be in a worse world than the one where Wayland is an option.

            1. Yes, the Enlightenment Sound Daemon, the one everyone hated because the latency was bad. They changed the name, the latency is still bad.

            • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:03AM (1 child)

              by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:03AM (#492171) Journal

              > PulseAudio (aka ESD

              I think you're mistaken. Pulseaudio was written by Lennart Poettering. Check the README file. It was intended to replace ESD; that doesn't mean it was ESD. Check the README:

              Copyright 2004 Lennart Poettering <mzcbylcnhqvb (at) 0pointer (dot)
                    de>
              [...]
                It is intended to be an improved drop-in replacement for the
                    [11]Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESOUND).
              [...]
              Acknowledgements

                    Eric B. Mitchell for writing ESOUND

              -- http://freedesktop.org/software/pulseaudio/releases/polypaudio-0.1.tar.gz [freedesktop.org]

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:34AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:34AM (#492219)

                The code is not ESD, but the problems, the performance and the difficulties getting rid of it is pretty much the same.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:47PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:47PM (#492377)

              I think Mir would have been bad for the community if it caught on the way PulseAudio [...] did. It was fine until people started targeting PA, which we're stuck with now.

              It is incredibly easy to avoid running pulseaudio today if you do not want to use it. Hardly anybody actually writes applications which call audio output APIs directly, it is much more common to use something like libsdl or libao or openal which support many different audio drivers.

              One thing to watch out for is distros installing an ALSA default pcm that automatically spawns pulseaudio and directs output to that. Such configuration can be deleted.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by mth on Tuesday April 11 2017, @07:03AM

            by mth (2848) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @07:03AM (#492162) Homepage

            So, what's the alternative? Should everyone just settle for whoever has the first-mover advantage in low-level software, regardless of the relative merits of each solution? Should all FOSS projects be equal, though some more equal than others?

            The merit of Mir was never clear. It was trying to solve the same problem as Wayland, in a similar but incompatible way. To be able to justify the extra effort needed to support it, it would have to be significantly different or better than Wayland.

            I would not want to see Mir ditched just because it will make things hard for a few people for a while. I'd rather it lives or dies on its own merits. If it's a better solution, then the FOSS ecosystem as a whole will be ultimately better off for it.

            It was making things hard for parts of the system that were already understaffed. So when Canonical decides to throw money at creating more work for the developers rather than helping them out, I can understand why they're not lining up to support Mir.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Tuesday April 11 2017, @07:13PM (1 child)

            by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @07:13PM (#492405) Journal

            I agree that standards do make things much easier for everyone. However, deciding on and implementing a standard will always be much more straightforward and less painful under an organisational hierarchy. While the FOSS model will ultimately decide a standard or standards through community usage (hopefully based on merit, but you never know...), you have to accept that the path to doing so will be more messy and painful.

            You come very, *very* close to hitting the point I've been screaming in my head all the way through this discussion:

            We need standard INTERFACES, but as much as possible we should avoid standard IMPLEMENTATIONS.

            How many mail clients are there? Friggin thousands probably. Which one do you need? Well...for most users, pick one that looks pretty, it really doesn't matter. They all do IMAP and POP3 and SMTP and all of that, so as long as they talk to the server the same way, you can switch from one to the other to the next ten times a day every day and it doesn't matter. Your mail server won't care, your desktop won't care, you aren't going to be forced to reinstall your OS or rip apart half your system or write new code to make that change.

            Obviously there are cases where the interface must change. There are places where you must break backward compatibility. But if you do it right, you can swap the new one in and pull the old one out without anyone really noticing. And then you make your changes and your custom extensions, IN AN OPEN AND TRANSPARENT WAY (ie, no M$ E-E-E strategy). Monoculture means attacks are easier (you already know what software to target) and more profitable (the same attack is effective against everyone). So it's a security risk, as well as just making it harder to build my computer the way I want.

            Parent mentions that we tend to target a single kernel (ie, the Linux kernel)...but I work with several different kernels every day and I barely notice the differences. Linux (in a half dozen different versions, and a few different architectures), AIX, FreeBSD (also various architectures)...yes, some software only runs on x86, some only runs on ARM, some only runs on BSD, some only runs on Linux. But the vast majority of stuff I use works on any of them, because they're all Unix, so they all share a pretty common interface. We already run the same display server with many different kernels under it and many different display managers above it...so I don't see why can't we run multiple display servers too.

            My dream is a system where I can swap out any single component at any time with virtually no impact. When the next Heartbleed comes, targeting OpenSSL, half the world might already be safe because LibreSSL doesn't have the bug, and the other half can just switch over as soon as their bosses approve the change. Meanwhile OpenSSL gets their stuff fixed and maybe the next attack targets Libre. Just like how I decided one day I didn't like KDE, so I switched to Enlightenment. And I can still use the same apps, and the same backends, and didn't really need to change the system configuration in any way. Our networks would be in a much better state if the entire stack could shift that easily. But instead we're going in the other direction, with systemD incorporating as much of the system as possible, and now the major display managers starting to rely on systemD components as well...we've already passed the point where people who ask how to remove systemD are generally advised to just reinstall a whole different distro, if not switching to an entirely different kernel. That's absolutely insane.

            • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:16AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:16AM (#492562)

              Nobody in Linuxland with its fetishization of "freedom" will be part of a standardization process. That would require compromise, leadership, and organization. Thus, the competing "standards", where "standard" means a single implementation. The only reason we got Linux was because Linus and the rest had the POSIX standard to implement, and it got a GUI because X11 was already written for Unix. All it needed was some adaptation. When there was a choice, Linux has been kind of dismissive of existing standards because Linux developers think they can do better. History shows that usually they can't.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:40AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:40AM (#492222)

      If they can make a better Free Software display server than X11 then it will catch on, and we’ll all be better for

      That's not how we do things anymore.

      Nowadays, someone will make an inferior alternative, and then get bully people into including his creation and have his fanboys call everyone who prefers the tried and tested solution names like "haters" and "neckbeards" while telling them that the inferior solution is new and thus "the future".

      Examples include PulseAudio, Systemd and Wayland.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:48AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:48AM (#492094)

    All that's missing is for Shuttleworth to say he's going home and he's taking his ball with him. (Too bad nobody wants his ball anyway.)

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:14AM (4 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:14AM (#492104)

      I agree about Shuttleworth's whiny tone here, however it simply isn't true that no one wants his ball. Ubuntu is still one of the most popular distros (even after losing a bunch of users to Mint and others because of Unity). And go read the messages about the announcement about abandoning Unity and Mir: lots and lots of people are not happy about losing Unity, and many of those are very unhappy about the idea of going back to Gnome3. I'm not a Unity fan myself, I've never even used it in fact, however I have used Gnome3 (and am kinda stuck with it at work) and it SUCKS. From what I've read about Unity it definitely looks at least better than the shit-show which is Gnome3, so I can definitely see why many people would be very unhappy about Ubuntu abandoning Unity. But what I didn't see almost anyone lamenting was the abandonment of Mir.

      IMO, Mark is making yet another stupid mistake here. Ubuntu isn't going to regain lots of users by just being another me-too Gnome3 distro, and Gnome3 simply is not very conducive to customization (by design). Mark even has said they won't try to go against what the Gnome3 devs have done by modifying it. WhyTF not? The whole draw of Ubuntu was to be a unique, user-focused distro that's easy to install and use, which concentrates on innovating on the user-facing elements. I guess they're giving that up for their cloud and other crap directions, and giving up on making world-leading Linux desktop distro. If you want a Gnome3 desktop, you might as well just use Fedora or something, and if you want something that tries to do better you can use Mint. What Mark should have done is abandon Mir, and adopt KDE, and then make a custom version of kde-plasma which pushes the Unity design elements that those users like so much. KDE allows this kind of customization easily, in different ways, and KDE doesn't have the "our way or the highway" mentality of the Gnome3 devs. KDE also has significantly lower resource usage than Gnome3, while simultaneously offering far more features and customization. How Gnome3 manages to be such a bloated, slow mess while also being so minimalistic with features is a genuine mystery; what the heck is it doing with all that RAM and those CPU cycles? With the Unity devs now no longer working on Unity, Canonical really should have the resources to do a really great distro using the KDE libraries and making their own customizations for it. And also unlike Gnome, the KDE team is likely to accept upstream contributions, whereas Gnome is notorious for refusing such things.

      • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:38AM

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:38AM (#492221) Journal

        Spot-on. My approach would have been to merge with or adopt as default the Ubuntu Mate distro honestly since that'd be a return to form (mostly; as of 1.18 Mate is gtk3 only and I *really* do not know how to feel about this...). But yeah, Plasma has been taking more and more of my time from Xfce recently and it's nicely matured, and configurable as you said. Either of these is preferably to Gnome 3, which has disappeared so far up its own ass it can eat its own lunch again.

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:48PM (2 children)

        by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:48PM (#492313)

        The whole draw of Ubuntu was to be a unique, user-focused distro that's easy to install and use, which concentrates on innovating on the user-facing elements.

        It was? Before the whole Unity thing* from what I remember the reason to go with Ubuntu was that it Just Worked(tm). It had a GNOME desktop but so did everybody else, so it was all about the internal tweaks and shiny tools to make everything smooth.

        *think my first Ubuntu install was Gutsy

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:12PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:12PM (#492361)

          So? The motto was "Linux for human beings", which covers "user-focused" and, given the implication that other distros were for nonhumans*, "unique"; you don't seem to be contesting "easy to install and use", so all that's left is "concentrates on innovating on the user-facing elements."

          Early on, the user-facing elements they "innovated on" were package management, configuration tools, that kind of thing. Once they ran out of innovations there (or I'm sure as they would say, once they had those polished enough that the desktop environment was a worse problem for "human beings"), they moved on to Unity, etc., but to me that's just two phases of manifestation of the same idea.

          *As someone who's always believed in making things as simple as possible, but no simpler, and sees Ubuntu's approach as creating hordes of users unaware of, and thus unable to handle, internal detail that matters, I was not unpleasantly surprised to learn that I, my fellow hackers, and really anyone who doesn't view "learning" as a bad, scary thing, were superhumans.

          • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:10PM

            by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:10PM (#492387)

            My point was that most OSs should have at least some awareness of making life easier for their users, so if that's the only thing that sets you apart ("we do it better than everyone else") that doesn't really make you unique. Cf. Apple I guess?

            Overall I'd say Ubuntu has a positive balance of worth. Maybe they wandered off into the weeds a bit with dubious-privacy-search and Mir and whatnot, but we got Mint and various other grandchildren out of the deal so hey.

            --
            "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:59AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:59AM (#492097)

    You know, it doesn't really matter why the haters hated Mir.
    Mir is dead. And I don't think the haters killed it, I think it just wasn't valuable enough to achieve escape velocity.
    So he's kinda touchy about having to kill Mir. I won't begrudge him that, he did put his own money into it, he earned the right to feel bad about having to kill it, even if the blame is (or is not) misplaced.

    I'm glad he's still ought there trying. Ubuntu is a major accomplishment and even though its the collaborative product of tens of thousands of people it wouldn't exist without him. So he deserves slack (aka love).

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:18AM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:18AM (#492106)

      I'm glad he's still ought there trying. Ubuntu is a major accomplishment and even though its the collaborative product of tens of thousands of people it wouldn't exist without him. So he deserves slack (aka love).

      Not so much. I'm not sure why he was so touchy about Mir; no one really wanted Mir, but lots of people wanted Unity, and are angry that he's abandoning that. But now, he's abandoning everything, and Ubuntu will be nothing more than a me-too look-alike Gnome3 distro. Remember, Gnome3 infamously eschews customization, so his distro's Gnome3 is going to look exactly like all the others, meaning there won't be much of a reason to use Ubuntu. He should have stuck with Unity, or perhaps adopted KDE and made a custom version of that with the Unity design. As it is, it seems like he's really just abandoning desktop Linux altogether, which I think is the absolute wrong action.

    • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:51PM

      by VLM (445) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:51PM (#492252)

      So he's kinda touchy about having to kill Mir. I won't begrudge him that, he did put his own money into it, he earned the right to feel bad about having to kill it, even if the blame is (or is not) misplaced.

      That's fairly insightful that the entire story boils down to "waaah the systemd guys at redhat successfully product-tied themselves into every distro for later submarine patent reasons or pure hubris or maybe stupidity it don't matter the point is why can't I join in and force everyone to bend to my will too, waaaah"

      Followed by a bunch of idiocy about it "obviously" being a right wing conspiracy because in the current year thats the easy way out. Hillary didn't lose because she sucked and her political ideas are obsolete, its, um, the Russian hackers yeah thats it. Everyone loved Hillary and 60s hippie BS but the hackers stole the election. So obviously its the same thing with Mir, we can't discuss the real problem so we'll just blame the whole thing on gun nuts and climate denial and white males.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:08PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:08PM (#492325) Journal

      I'm glad he's still ought there trying. Ubuntu is a major accomplishment and even though its the collaborative product of tens of thousands of people it wouldn't exist without him. So he deserves slack (aka love).

      Personally, my view of him went down significantly went he tried to defend the marketing/commercial stuff in Ubuntu (particularly the Amazon "home lens" integration). I'll give him praise for leading the project in the beginning, and I'll give the Ubuntu model credit for its role in creating standardized release cycles and pushing the Linux desktop experience to be usable for a mainstream audience. There were bumps along the way, but there was a lot of good there. I'd even be okay with some of his decisions over the years to try to force users into the Unity model or whatever. I may personally disagree with that model, but I can't fault him for trying. (And there always were alternative official derivatives for those who disliked that.)

      I can, however, fault him for going against his own Ubuntu philosophy in basically turning part of his OS into a commercial adspace (which also had privacy implications). If I remember correctly, it took about 18 months to get the project to agree to change this "feature" to "opt-in." I understand Shuttleworth is a businessman and Canonical is a business, but such a stark violation of the core philosophy of his project will cause me to distrust Shuttleworth for a long time. This is the same project that I remember jumping through several hoops to install proprietary codecs, drivers, etc. back in the day because it wanted to maintain a more strict separation from commercial influence. And it was now running Amazon ads on your searches of your own computer and sharing your data with 3rd parties by default.

      Sorry -- I had moved on from Ubuntu before that happened, but that was a significant betrayal. It's hard to trust what he says since then.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:23AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:23AM (#492109) Journal

    Criticizing Microsoft which is a abusive monopoly is perfectly alright. To refer that as love to hate whatever is mainstream misses the point completely. And says more about Shuttleworth than anything else. Adding to that, equaling such criticism with ad-hominem that such persons are anti social just makes Shuttleworth ready for the trashcan.

    So when Canonical went mainstream, the effects were felt all over the place ie mainstream. So all the flaws became more obvious and more important to get rectified. The mainstream player also have tendencies to use their domination leverage to direct other peoples resources like developer time. So yeah.. deal with the criticism safe space special snow fling that can't handle a central position and what goes with it.

    Adding to that by trying to fragment with yet-another-graphic-server, it better be better than what exists.
    (is it?)

    I suspect Unity is a resource hog without much additional usefulness?

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:35AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:35AM (#492114)

    Unity and GNOME 3 are both designed around the idea that phones and desktops will share a UI. The actual functionality that we need is the ability to have a phone serve up a fully traditional desktop UI, and for a desktop PC to be able to run phone apps. Android developers already go one way with emulators. Going the other way is possible too, as seen in VNC clients for phones. Do these things for code running on the same system and you have a working answer to the need. Don't pretend that the experience will be seamless; it just needs to work so that we can have phones that usefully plug into monitors and keyboards.

    Mir and Wayland are "second system syndrome" disasters, as described in The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks, with a big helping of NIH. We didn't need a bunch of cheap n00b developers (plus Pottering probably) doing a bad reinvention of X. We needed a careful cleanup and modernization effort by super-experienced folk.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:24AM (#492128)

      I still have no idea why Mir exists.

      Wayland has a lot of tangible goals.

      But I see now (elsewhere) that people are abandoning XOrg because it finally sunk in that it was the XOrg developers themselves who created Wayland.

      I will never understand tribalism. But y'all have fun going back to XFree86 or whatever makes you feel good.

      Better not use XOrg, because those are the same n00b developers behind Wayland.

    • (Score: 1) by WillR on Tuesday April 11 2017, @12:59PM

      by WillR (2012) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @12:59PM (#492233)
      A modernized, cleaned up X ceases to be X. All that legacy font handling stuff that nobody uses since GTK/Qt do it better and with antialiasing, line/box/bezier curve drawing cruft that nobody uses because again, the toolkits do it better, the hacks to make 8-bit displays semi-usable, all the stuff that nobody uses anymore are required parts of the X11 protocol.
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:59PM (1 child)

      by VLM (445) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:59PM (#492255)

      phones and desktops will share a UI

      There's a deeper problem with the whole ... situation.

      Why can't my hiking boots and car have the same UI? Why can't my screwdriver and my hammer have the same UI? Why can't an outhouse/streetshitting and a toilet have the same UI? Why can't my physical corded analog landline phone have the same UI as my physical wooden desk, not talking about computers at all? Oh yeah because that's a really bad idea. Merely being borderline technologically possible due to the miracle of Turing complete hardware doesn't mean its a great idea. We live in the computer equivalent era of the TV infomercial "pocket fisherman" where its somehow a wise idea to buy a combination ear hair trimmer, fishing pole, and beer can opener gadget, and some money is made off that stupidity, but most of the population laughs and says that stuff don't work, which makes the crazy people work harder at doing dumb things (I know, the general public will declare 2017 as the year of the pocket fisherman if only we add a kitchen gadget like a zucchini spiralizer, after all we already got a turning handle on the fishing pole part! Genius! NOW 2017 can be the year of the pocket fisherman multitool)

      The problem is phones and desktops having the same UI is taken seriously.

      • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:26PM

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:26PM (#492300) Journal

        Absolutely agree. It's certainly a worthy goal to have some commonality in the appearance and interface across devices. But the idea that you'll operate a tiny handheld phone the exact same way you'd want to use a 100X-more powerful desktop computer with three large monitors is just bonkers.

        We need tools that allow efficient communication between devices. And perhaps tools that can allow direct access between devices when needed (like remote desktop software or whatever). But there's no strong reason why the default OS should function exactly the same way on all these devices.

        All that said, I see no reason why some people can't create such a thing -- and I'm sure there are SOME people out there who really do want all their devices to behave exactly the same. It's the idea that such a development is somehow "inevitable" and obviously the next logical thing as a default UI that always seemed baffling to me.

  • (Score: 1) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:36AM (3 children)

    by its_gonna_be_yuge! (6454) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:36AM (#492115)

    Mr. Shuttleworth is upset that his personal choices on things aren't automatically universally loved. He put his own money into the game, and doesn't understand why everyone out there can't just do the worship dance
    around his program. He has done some good stuff, but he needs to get a thicker skin.

    I personally never got into the Ubuntu mindset much. Gentoo works fine and comes without drama.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:55PM (#492383)

      Gentoo works fine and comes without drama.

      You haven't been around Gentoo very long, have you?

    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:35PM (1 child)

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:35PM (#492393)

      Gentoo works fine and comes without drama.

      Haven't run into any nasty portage blocks lately then : P

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
      • (Score: 1) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:09AM

        by its_gonna_be_yuge! (6454) on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:09AM (#492559)

        My portage problems are mostly with qt and perl for some reason recently. Nothing major. Gentoo still lets idiots like me avoid systemd.

        Anyways, docker sounds like a better plan than systemd if you have enough resources on your box so I'll try to go that way but so far I haven't had the guts to jump into it on Gentoo.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:47AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:47AM (#492117)

    Ok so I realize I'm in the minority here. But with Ubuntu dropping support for Unity I'm left wondering where to go from here.
    I like my Ubuntu desktop. I enjoy Unity, Gnome in it's various flavors does not give me the seamless experience and ease of use I got from Unity.

    I don't want to move on from what I have, but eventually I will have to and I'm not seeing any other DE that looks as good, works as well or has the power that Unity gives me to find just exactly what I'm looking for.

    Any suggestions?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:58AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:58AM (#492119)

      Any suggestions?

      Windows 10? /rimshot

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:26AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:26AM (#492131)

      Gentoo?

      I felt the same way when I had to move away from KDE 3.5.

    • (Score: 2) by fnj on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:46AM

      by fnj (1654) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @05:46AM (#492148)

      Oh for god's sake. Just run KDE. It's way, way ahead of Unity in every way. I finally gave up on bug-ridden MATE and switched to KDE. Granted it's sad to see a choice shrivel up and disappear. Thankfully nothing critical is lost in this case. This is what I don't understand: why doesn't some group just take over Unity, anyway? It's not like Shuttleworth has the power to take the code back out of GPL.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:27AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 11 2017, @10:27AM (#492207) Journal

      Try Lubuntu, with an LXDE desktop.
      Runs without a hitch on a Pentium dual-core T4500, 2GB RAM laptop.
      I can even use the laptop to sorta reasonable develop in Java and PHP using Eclipse (a thing that gobbles memory even if you only look at it).

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:04PM

      by VLM (445) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:04PM (#492259)

      I like my Ubuntu desktop. I enjoy Unity

      What do you do with that stuff?

      Not even being sarcastic. Genuinely interested.

      If it helps your perspective the way the "other side" lives is I have some lightweight ways to start then switch between urxvt-unicode, emacs, and chrome browser. My phone has had better music/podcast/audiobook playing since the last decade so I don't use my desktop for that although there are web alternatives (like watch youtube on browser or I guess there's some way to use audible on a browser although I've not researched) I know "desktop" is extremely complicated and huge application like gigs and gigs of code, but I don't "do" desktop and don't know what I'm missing.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:58AM (3 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:58AM (#492141) Journal

    What, does Shuttleworth not accept that we have a Climate Change problem? He believes there's a real debate over the matter, rather than a bunch of denialism from anti-science, illiterate trolls?

    • (Score: 2) by Zyx Abacab on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:14AM (2 children)

      by Zyx Abacab (3701) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @08:14AM (#492174)

      You're probably trolling, but whatever. Straight from Mr. Shuttleworth himself:

      being on one side or the other [of the debate is] a sign of tribal allegiance

      No, that does not imply that he is a climate change denier. It implies only one thing: that there is tribalism in the debate.

      I agree that there shouldn't be—and indeed, there isn't—much debate about whether climate change exists. That said, the denialists try to artificially create debate, as well as an atmosphere of us-versus-them, both of which lead to this tribalism.

      Pointing this out does not make Mark Shuttleworth a climate change denier. Geez.

      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:38PM (1 child)

        by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:38PM (#492309)

        I'm not sure it's fair to call it "tribalism" when what he means is "if you're in other tribe you're WRONG!"

        Tribe A - Mir is good (Canonical)
        Tribe B - Mir sucks ("Linux assholes")

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:57PM

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @03:57PM (#492316)

          It absolutely *is* tribalism, on one side: the Canonical side. The irony is that Mark is accusing the community of tribalism, when it's really just him and his small cadre of followers that are exhibiting tribal behavior on this issue.

          He is right about many other issues showing tribal behavior: climate change, gun control, etc. (with varying amounts of tribalism on each side; on the climate change issue the tribalism is much heavier on the anti-AGW side since they don't have any actual evidence, and their side isn't populated by any actual scientists, but there's a certain amount of tribalism on the pro side too since not everyone there is actually a climate scientist qualified to read and interpret the data, so they just follow what the experts say. Gun control is much more tribal, with some valid arguments on both sides along with a lot of wishful thinking and dogma.)

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:43AM (2 children)

    by FakeBeldin (3360) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @06:43AM (#492160) Journal

    From the headline I thought that Shuttleworth was:
    - badmouthing those who uttered criticism
    - thinks climate change is a hoax
    - thinks gun control is stupid

    Then, in the summary, it says: "[The Mir debate] became a political topic...".
    So instead of the above, he's saying:
    - the criticism got out of control
    - no commitment to a PoV on climate change
    - no commitment to a PoV on gun control

    That's rather different. I politely suggest to update the headline.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:48AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @09:48AM (#492200)

      Yeah, but this story has the most posts in last few days. Clickbait must be working :D

      The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance.

      slightly better than the headline!! Because he's 100% correct. Now what he is missing is the debate around systemd to put the cherry on top of that cake.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:05PM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:05PM (#492321)

      Wow, really? (I wrote the headline, in case it isn't obvious.)

      However, the way I see it, he has absolutely badmouthed those who've criticized him, particularly with Mir. But I never intended to imply he had any positions on climate change or gun control, though now I see how you read it that way, so I apologize for that. The real truth is that I mainly copied this from a Slashdot article summary, and tried to change it around some, adding another link to a second BetaNews article about Mark addressing the Mir criticism directly, and focusing on that more. But I'll admit I don't make submissions very often (this is probably only my second since I joined this site, back when the site started).

      Anyway, unless I'm mistaken I can't update the headline. Heck, I can't even see the submission queue any more; I saw it once yesterday, but then after I submitted this, there seems to be no way for me to see the submission queue any more.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:12AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @11:12AM (#492214)

    10 reasons why Ubuntu should use KDE Plasma instead of GNOME
    http://www.alexl.netsons.org/blogposts/10-reasons-why-ubuntu-should-use-kde-plasma-instead-of-gnome/ [netsons.org]

    • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:10PM (1 child)

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:10PM (#492326) Journal

      #include

      int main(void) {

      for(short int iter=1; iter=10; iter++) {printf("%d - Because Gnome 3 sucks!\n",iter);}

      return(0);
      }

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:12PM

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday April 11 2017, @04:12PM (#492328) Journal

        Niiiiice going, Soylent! Thanks for eatin' my brackets. It's almost like you all don't want some kind of shell exploit run through the forum software or something ;)

        --
        I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:39PM (#492275)

    The stated reason for Mir's existence was that Canonical thought they could do exactly what Wayland does, but ship a working product quicker than Wayland despite starting one year behind. They also presented some very sketchy technical criticisms of Wayland's design which were immediately refuted by Wayland's development team.

    The stated reasons, then, were complete bullshit. The actual reason was that Canonical wanted to make a play in the mobile space, and use a GPLv3'ed codebase that they fully owned as a weapon to make inroads into it: Pay us a licensing fee to incorporate our shitty display server into your device or the GPLv3 will force you to surrender your patent rights. Android is permissively-licensed and had a crushing advantage in market position already, but this converged UX and desktop dock capability built into the core of the system's design was supposed to be the killer feature.

    So Shuttleworth lied about his reasons for starting this project, and the actual reasons were hostile and divisive to the wider community. Then he gets pissy when called out on his bullshit.

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