> Did you know: you have John Carmack to thank for first porting X11 to OSX? Thank you John!!
Is there anything written about the background to this? Wikipedia doesn't talk about him ever working for Apple (although maybe that's just not mentioned).
Is there anything written about the background to this? Wikipedia doesn't talk about him ever working for Apple (although maybe that's just not mentioned).
https://github.com/timon37/xwayland/blob/master/hw/xquartz/m...
Xorg forked from XFree86 circa 2003.
It only took me almost 2 decades to notice.
I also thought I read somewhere that Carmack persuaded Apple to bet big on OpenGL for OS X. (Ironic now that it's deprecated.)
Note that with current X, HiDPI and multi-monitor and tear-free experience still have problems and they are handled via a morass of legacy extensions of varying design quality (this is aside from the drivers issue)-- when OS X was started, none of these existed except maybe DBE and a nascent RANDR (there was no COMPOSITE, no RENDER, RANDR vs very primitive), I think there was the Xinerama crap that no one uses anymore because it is terrible.
So they would have had to develop that, for what benefit? What does X get you out of the box? A drawing model that was outdated even by 1995 standards. And network transparency? Everytime these discussions come up, somebody brings this up, and I wonder what drugs they are on. The love by some for the X network model has always baffled me, because it is terrible - it has virtually no practical usability for modern drawing models and compositing, and the worst is it isn't robust - lose your TCP connection, goodbye session! X hits #1 and #2 of the "Fallacies of distributed computing" pretty hard.
RDP, VNC, SPICE are what we use today, for very good reasons.
"..., Richie reminded the audience that Steve Jobs stood at the same podium a few years back and announced that X was brain-dead and would soon die.
"He was half-right," Ritchie said. "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks."