Re: The future of X11 on OS X
Re: The future of X11 on OS X
- Subject: Re: The future of X11 on OS X
- From: Michael Hernandez <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 19:26:18 -0400
On Nov 1, 2007, at 6:29 PM, Nathaniel Gray wrote:
Hi folks,
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:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications
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!
Cheers,
-n8
You know, I can't help but agree here on a couple of points - first of
all the thanks!
Secondly, I'm glad I'm not the only one who looks at running X11 apps
in OS X seems to be very similar to emulation. Of course it's not the
same thing, but it "feels" like the applications are being emulated.
What I've been doing is using various GTK themes to sort of skin the
apps and make them appear as if they were running native.
While there is nothing quite like running a native app, and while X11
doesn't extinguish my burning desire to run...for example... gimp 2.4
as a native app... (haha) I'm glad that X11 is available as an option
and is moving forward.
--Mike H
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