Mir Still Causing Concerns By Ubuntu Derivatives

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 14 June 2013 at 06:04 PM EDT. 115 Comments
UBUNTU
With Canonical's planned adoption of their in-house Mir Display Server over the next year rather than using an X.Org Server or Wayland, derivatives such as KDE-based Kubuntu continue to fear the change and what exactly the options will be.

KDE will not support Mir as long as it remains a one-distribution solution. With KDE not coming to Mir for the foreseeable future, Jonathan Riddell of Kubuntu started a new technical discussion about non-Unity flavors and Mir.

Basically, the options now for Kubuntu (and similar derivatives like the LXDE and Xfce versions) is to either use Mir, use Wayland and hope everything works out, or simply end of life the distribution. Jonathan on the behalf of the Kubuntu development community is hoping that using Wayland will work with Debian packages and that it will be able to co-exist with Mir. Using Mir really isn't acceptable since the Mir KDE support won't be accepted upstream and the developers have limited resources.

The discussion so far today on the mailing list is pretty much as expected with much uncertainty still existing about Mir outside of Canonical. Thomas Voß of Canonical, one of the Mir developers, did express possible interest in seeing about integrating KDE/KWin support onto Mir anyhow, if he's able to obtain some KDE guidance.

The only other news out of this discussion so far is that there's likely coming a forum for all Mir stakeholders (other ISVs, etc) to discuss issues and drive alignment around this Wayland competitor.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week