On 4 January 2015 at 17:16, James Freer jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com wrote:
Ubuntu with Unity have clearly pushed down the Mir route. However, Debian are looking at the Wayland direction which has caused friction from what I can gather.
I'm with Wayne on this.
Ubuntu has its own very different desktop environment, a pretty fundamental component of a desktop OS, and has been pretty successful doing so. Kubuntu/Xubuntu/etc all manage to co-exist with their own desktop environments. The Mir/Wayland "choice" is no more fundamental, and it seems to me that it is tied more to the desktop environment than the core O/S anyway. So Debian + Mir + Unity = Ubuntu, Ubuntu + KDE (and maybe +Wayland) = Kubuntu, etc (apologies for the massive oversimplification!). Then you have Mint with it's own desktop with versions based on Ubuntu and Debian.
The whole point of the way the O/S has developed, based on the Unix philosophy, is that each component does one thing (and, ideally, does it well!) so that they are interchangeable. Reality is more complex but it *should* be possible, and indeed encouraged, that different paths co-exist. A Linux distro (distribution) is exactly that: one person/group/company's selection of components which they prefer over someone else's.
The debate over init processes is far more significant in my opinion, mainly because of the feature creep in systemd, which makes it much harder to just swap out with something else if you choose to.