1x43: Got The Om On

[jonobacon]

@basje

In short, I really hope you’ll be back with the full crew for the next episode, because it’s really not the same without Lunduke.

We hope he is back too - he should be.

[sil]

@KieranMckenzie

Seriously I just want a technical explanation of real technical reasons that Mir is better suited to Ubuntu’s goals than Wayland, and the analysis of whether those benefits are worth all the pain these competing systems have caused and will cause in the future

See, I don’t think that is what you want. Because you’ve had that from Ubuntu’s engineering team already. You just don’t believe it. Which is, of course, your absolute right, but there’s little point asking the same question over and over because you don’t like the answer, in the hope that you get a different answer…

I didn’t slag off Warhammer! I don’t play, and never have (I was a TSR kid), but the friend that I mentioned does, and he keeps telling me about his army of Black Templars or something

I pretty much agree with your argument about KDE being good at apps but not good at platform coherency.

[KieranMckenzie]

@sil

See, I don’t think that is what you want. Because you’ve had that from Ubuntu’s engineering team already. You just don’t believe it.

Actually I really haven’t. I’m perfectly willing to accept that maybe I lapse into a coma randomly for weeks on end and just missed them all through poor luck but I really haven’t found anything decent on this topic, especially real interviews. Most of what I know about the differences comes from their wikipedia pages tbh.

[sil]

http://blog.cooperteam.net/search?q=mir

[KieranMckenzie]

Cheers for the link, the post on 12th March 2013 was pretty interesting.

[evanx]

I believe Mozilla made the right move with FirefoxOS. Mobile is the new mega web, but not very open with its apps and app stores that are device specific e.g. iOS vs Android vs what have you.

The open web is being sacrificed at the mobile altar of in-app purchases and walled gardens. That must change. If Mozilla is spending all their revenue to try to fix that, then good on them.

Clearly native mobile UX is still better, but it shouldn’t stay that way. One can ague that the native Windows desktop app experience is better than the web apps, but nevertheless web apps are winning e.g. Gmail, Google docs, Dropbox etc.

Mozilla had to lead a charge to build a mobile app platform with open web technologies. In the process, they have taken JavaScript and its telephony and mobile hardware APIs forward, for the benefit of the open web. They are building on the Android platform, but stripping out its non-web UI, and putting a web UI in its place. That seems like a reasonable exercise in the right direction. The likes of FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Touch can hopefully get enough devices in the market, to become self-sustainable, small but growing players, leading the open mobile web.

How much of that $200M is being spent on Rust and Servo? They have produced a new programming language that is by all accounts pretty awesome. I think they’ve had it pretty good in terms of revenue, but that is declining and so in the coming years they will have to rationalise their R&D efforts. But hopefully they’ll always be in the mix, innovating and leading the open web.

Interesting that Facebook Native is leveraging JavaScript to build native UX mobile apps in a rather webby way. It’s not your grand-daughter’s open mobile web, but it’s a pragmatic step towards that.