Canonical announced a new display server – Mir, and it is good for the consumer
Canonical have last week announced that they are developing their own display server to replace the ubiquitous X display server, a project called Mir, and the shit storm has begun anew(as what happened after Unity, Ubuntu Touch and other Canonical announcements). Contrary to popular belief, I think that this happening is a good thing for the Linux community in whole.
There are many reasons why I think this is good, most are not really concrete technical things, but I can list a few:
- X11 is showing its age. There were some internal efforts to modernize it (e.g. kdrive which have mostly merged into the existing code) and some external efforts to replace it (Fresco and Wayland to name a few), but none have made much of an impact on the current state of Linux display.
- From first look, Mir is a modern code base written in C++11 and Boost, which I like.
- Diversity is generally a good thing.
If we go over the last point in a bit more depth, I think we can see why Mir would generally be a good thing for Linux developers and users and why people should stop being negative.