Last I heard XWayland didn't actually work properly either, and the official position of the Wayland devs was that it was Not Their Problem because it wasn't part of Wayland, they had no interest in fixing it, and anyone who suggested this reflected badly on Wayland was just spreading FUD because it wasn't part of Wayland.

Which, incidentally, is fair enough.

They've not killed XMir, and they've not excluded anything. They've delayed shipping XMir and Mir for the Ubuntu desktop releases until they can sort out some remaining issues.

Given that one of the stated rationales for Mir was the ability to deliver quicker than Wayland, that's a fairly significant decision. Fedora 20 is going to launch with Wayland as a preview, after all.

Ubuntu 13.10 will have Mir as a preview as well, just not enabled by default on the desktop (but, notably, enabled by default on phones)

Which phones?

There are 4 "officially supported" devices being Canonical's priority and then a whole list of other devices that can use the Ubuntu Touch OS: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices

To check on the progress of the 4 priority devices, see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArLs7UPtu-hJdDZ...

Conclusion:

1. You can use Ubuntu Touch on a Galaxy Nexus already today, for the most important features.

2. The Ubuntu Touch launch date was set for the end of this month (october 2013).

Excluding it from the desktop for one release is killing it. A big chunk of ubuntu's repository is now broken, resulting in a big "fuck you" from the users (including me) and no more donations...

Even if they ship X and Mir, people will just use X.

> Excluding it from the desktop for one release is killing it.

No, it is delaying it from being the default on Ubuntu by 6 months.

> A big chunk of ubuntu's repository is now broken

Really? How so? I have not noticed anything broken at all. How exactly is it broken?

> resulting in a big "fuck you" from the users

I really very much doubt most users will even notice, and I also think you severely overestimate how many of those who do notice will care, and how many of those who care who sees Mir as something negative and/or are bothered by the delay.

> Even if they ship X and Mir, people will just use X.

The point is they will eventually ship XMir, Mir and Mir-enabled toolkit versions by default, so everyone that don't take explicit steps to install a plain X server instead will be running Mir whether or not they run all their familiar apps - including X apps - on top of it.

Please, calm down.

Things are working OK. The world is not ending and Ubuntu repository is working just fine.

For now. Watch what happens when Mir ships:

1. Noone will use Mir because xlib apps and non-ported toolkits will fail miserably.

2. It will not get tested properly.

3. Release+1 with XMir will be shipped and Mir will be turned on.

4. All hell will break loose.

If it doesn't happen, I'll cook and eat my laptop.

The only flag waving so far has been "shuttleworth installed it on his dell and it worked ok for a couple of weeks with some problems".

Canonical's target market is mobile devices. I suspect they will be testing a complete mobile stack. As mentioned above in this discussion, there are 4 example phones that already have functioning images.

Shuttleworth probably knows how to keep his Dell working, and will possibly be sticking to LTS releases.

It isn't "excluded". Just not enabled by default. I run Xmir on my laptop without any issues. Multi monitor support isn't there yet so my workstation still runs regular Xorg. The difference in user experience between the two is none.

On a laptop, using Xmir instead of X will save battery life with almost no performance loss.

Measurements or it didn't happen.

You've misunderstood this decision. They've delayed XMir and Mir. Ubuntu 13.10 will ship with X as its display server, just like all previous versions of Ubuntu.