Like a lot of you I was pretty unhappy about the state of X11 as
shipped with Leopard. After reading Ben Byer's posts here and
elsewhere, though, I'm pleased to say that I'm actually feeling
optimistic about the future of X11 on OS X for the first time in
ages! I'm very happy to hear that Apple's X11 is now based on X.org
instead of XFree86, since that's definitely where the future lies. It
also makes all the difference in the world to know that there's
somebody at Apple who is interested in taking X11 in a more open
direction. (It's never made sense to me that X11.app, based on an
open-source project, was developed in such a closed fashion.)
I know there are problems with X11 today that need to be fixed, but
I'd like to take a moment to speculate about where X11 on OS X should
head in the future. Take a look at VMWare Fusion or Parallels. There
you've got an entire foreign OS running in a VM, but foreign apps seem
convincingly native in many ways. They can have separate dock icons,
drag-n-drop works, they can be set to handle file types, and so on.
There's no reason not to have this level of integration for X11 apps
as well! There are well-accepted specifications in the X universe for
many protocols that could make tight integration possible:
So anyhow, I'll finish up by saying thanks once more to Ben. Your
attitude and openness on this list and elsewhere has taken me from the
pits of frustration to a state of true optimism. I'm happy to see
those fixes rolling in (xorg-server 1.2a2 is already much better).
Nice work!
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