Re-blog: Martin Gräßlin Reply to “All the faces of Ubuntu”

Friday, 8 March 2013  |  jriddell

A repost of elite KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin from Planet KDE

Dear Mark Shuttleworth,

so you “have absolutely no doubt that Kwin will work just fine on top of Mir”. This is great and I totally appreciate that you think Mir is a great system. But I’m wondering why you don’t use KWin then, after all it will work fine on top of Mir and is Qt based?

But I have doubt that KWin will work just fine on top of Mir and I have already stated so. You might have wanted to check the facts before stating such claims (somehow I get a feeling for a pattern here).

What makes me think that you cannot make such bold claims:

  • You don’t even know how to write KWin
  • Currently the number of commits to KWin by an Canonical employee is 0 (git log — kwin | grep @canonical)
  • No Canonical employee has so far contacted the KWin team on how we could integrate Mir and whether we are interested at all
  • I have to question the abilities of Canonical to judge what other software can do and cannot after Canonical argued with non existing issues in Wayland for Mir
  • We are still waiting for the Wayland adjustments for KDE done by Canonical. May I remind you:
    We’ll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there’s no reason for them not to be there on day one either.

I have to ask you to keep KWin out of the pro-Mir campaign. I didn’t ask for Mir, I don’t want Mir and reading blog posts like the one which triggered this reply does lower my motivation to ever have anything to do with Mir. Mir is an answer to a question nobody asked. It’s a solution to problem which does not exist.

Your community manager recently posted on Google+ he had a frustrating day. Guess what my week has been and guess who I can blame. Guess what I great day I will have after reading your blog post this morning.