He says that Canonical's pressured developers to implement features that weren't needed

Nov 20, 2013 12:10 GMT  ·  By

Martin Gräßlin, one of the most important KDE developers, has criticized Canonical's decision to postpone the Mir launch because it disrupted the work of third-party developers from other projects.

Martin Gräßlin has been rather critical of Canonical, especially in the recent past, and has even severed all ties with the Ubuntu community after Mark Shuttleworth wrote a blog post about the people who were opposing the Mir project.

Canonical initially announced that Ubuntu 13.10 would feature Mir by default, the new display server built by Canonical. Some of the Ubuntu flavors would have the option to adopt XMir, a blend of X and Mir that would ensure a smooth transition in the future towards the full Mir experience.

That didn't happen, and Mark Shuttleworth announced that Mir would not ship as the default solution for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. This is understandable because Mir is still in the development stages and Ubuntu 14.04 will be an LTS version, which must be very stable.

“At least that was the plan a few months ago. And that's what makes me seriously pissed, now, reading that they don't deliver. Why? Because they created pressure that Kubuntu switches to XMir. I got contacted by people on what to do to make sure that KWin works on XMir.”

“And all that although they were aware that it doesn't make any sense for Kubuntu to switch given that 14.04 will ship Plasma 4.11 and they knew that upstream is working on a huge transition including Qt 5 and XCB,” said Martin Gräßlin in a Google+ post.

The way Martin Gräßlin feels towards Canonical is not a secret, but it seems that Mir did create a lot of problems for him and his team.

“Why all the pressure on 3rd parties? Why all the disruption? Why disrupt our work at all? There was no reason, none at all, to contact anybody from KDE for XMir + 4.11 stack. That will now never happen,” he also said.

As it stands right now, Mir will most likely land in Ubuntu 14.10, which is almost a year from now.