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0 pointswmf9y ago0 comments

I got the impression that everyone who didn't work for Canonical thought Mir was a bad idea, so that was a rare case where there was pretty much one voice. IIRC, the best case for Mir (if it had shipped on time with no bugs) would have been basically at parity with Wayland, which was started years earlier. This justifies claims of NIH.

The Snappy/Flatpak situation is different because each system has its own advantages and disadvantages and Snappy didn't come years after Flatpak.

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2 comments · 1 top-level

throw20169y ago· 1 in thread

You whole assumption rests on your 'personal impression'. You simply can't know what other people in the open source world think or presume everyone agrees with you. To claim 'one voice' seems a rather large stretch. There are tons of Ubuntu users and others in the ecosystem who may think differently.

What makes you so sure Mir would not have some advantages? It seems impossible to say either way. For all we know it could offer benefits and choice to the ecosystem. Or die because users would reject it.

Open source has always been about diversity and choice. There is now an unfortunate trend of some commentators misusing words like 'community' to push their own agendas or trying to pass off personal opinion as a widely held fact. This basically challenges open source diversity.

johannesburgel9y ago

The "tons of Ubuntu users and people who support diversity" are completely unimportant in both the Mir/Wayland and systemd cases. They don't contribute anything (except maybe a lot of drama), don't have the technical knowledge to decide anything and don't have to support anything. They're just spectators shouting from the tribunes.

systemd was resented by some users, but for developers it had so many advantages (especially stuff like logind) that a huge part of them just started happily using it.

As for Mir, I cannot think of a single discussion on any communications channel ever where a Non-Canonical developer thought it was a good idea. The GNOME people wouldn't even look at it. The KDE people openly stated that they hated it (http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com/ms... and https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/05/mir-in-kubunt...). No Non-Canonical developer ever added support for it to any UI toolkit. For me, that's very, very close to 'one voice'.