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Comment by gvb | Hacker News Reader

Just for comparison, Apple "ditched" X too (they never used X). When they went to OS X they used Display Postscript rather than X. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript

This has been a mixed bag: it has been good for Apple-only programs, but it significantly slowed and complicated the porting of existing and new X-based programs to Apple.

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Display Postscript was used in NeXT's NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP as well as the initial release of Apple's Mac OS X Server 1.0 (Rhapsody), but for OS X proper, Apple switched to Quartz 2D which is closer to PDF than Postscript.

EDIT: And X11 first appeared in 1984 and wasn't released in current form until September 1987, NeXT's partnership with Adobe created their version of Display Postscript in 1987 (the first version appeared in 1986), so X11 didn't have a long history as a protocol at that point.

Yeah, and it made starting up any X-based application on OS X a real pain. X apps are second-class citizens. This is one (of many) reasons I could never quite reach a level of comfort on a Mac.

It's a calculated move on Apple's part. They don't want you to use X11, so they make it as painful as possible while still keeping it usable so that developers can't write new apps for it (they have to use Cocoa). It's strictly compatibility environment only.

> It's a calculated move on Apple's part.

that seems unlikely in light of:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872915

AFAIK (I don't have the source right now), Apple originally considered using X11 for the display server on OS X (in fact, early versions shipped with a version of xf86 that ran natively as it does on other *nixes), but after deciding on all the compositing and prettiness features that they wanted, they would have torn so much out of X11 that it wouldn't be remotely compatible anymore, so they wrote Quartz 2D.

Later, of course, things like Compiz came along, but they've always seemed like weak hacks compared to things like Quartz. Hopefully wayland will change everything.

This may be the explanation you are referring to:

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=75257&cid=67346...

Previous insightful Quartz vs. X discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248168

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