ShelLuser said:
Hm, Mir is a space station which crashed down to Earth in 2001. Makes you wonder
A bit more serious though; I think the Ubuntu project is losing it. It started with Unity which many people started to dislike, then the
desktop search tie-in with Amazon (I know 'El Reg' tends to exaggerate at times, but when many people
openly protest on Shuttleworth's blog and questions about "how to get rid of..." also score high then I think El Reg got it right).
Don't forget that (like anything) a small problem will be posted about by a heap of whiners and not necessarily by the larger majority who have zero issue at all with it. I'm sure there are plenty of people using unity without whining about it - they don't feel the need to post "Yeah, I'm running Unity and it is great!".
I understand initial versions sucked hard. I've used the latest ubuntu release and whilst there are a few quirks I don't particularly like it is as slick as any other desktop for a general end user (Yes it has spyware type features that can be disabled - but what do you think Ubuntu's business model is? Give stuff away for free forever? You WILL pay in one way or another. If not with money, then with data.).
Would I go out of my way to install it? No. But as a default, friendly UI it isn't a bad choice.
As far as popularity goes - users don't "want DRM" or "love DRM" inherently. They just want things to work out of the box. Many don't know or care about the DRM at all. So long as it works, and Ubuntu does well in that area.
The percentage of users who actually know or care about DRM at all is very, very low.
edit:
On Mir... GPL3 notwithstanding, it looks like Mir is actually something that has been sorely needed in Unix/Linux land for some time now - a low level graphics platform that only provides a low level drawing API that targets GL for other software to sit on top of. I.e., it doesn't necessarily replace Wayland, X, etc. It sits underneath them, between them and the hardware.
So for example X11, rather than having a video driver to talk directly to hardware, will just talk to a shim between it and Mir. That means most of the driver stuff can be stripped out of X11.
I'm keen to know more - hopefully if it is decent, being an
API it can be re-implemented under a different license if required.