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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

My OS of choice is OS X 10.9 "Mavericks". It's not old enough to be "Retro" yet, but I want to stay here for a while, and Firefox says they're dropping support in a year. And while there are a bunch of alternatives browsers I can move to (ArcticFox, Unofficial Intel Builds of TenFourFox, etc), they don't always work with every website.

So, one long-term possibility I'm toying with is using OS X's implementation of X11. I could run Firefox in a modern Linux distro (probably a VM on the same machine, although it could be a different machine), and use X Forwarding to make it appear as a normal app. I think this should theoretically work for a lot of OS's, from the earliest versions of OS X to decade-old copies of Linux.

Has anyone used this approach for old machines?

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> It's not old enough to be "Retro" yet, but I want to stay here for a while

It's old enough to not get any security updates. Doesn't that concern you?

Snow Leopard is my favourite OS to date. It was blazing fast and got out of the way. After that, it kept getting worse gradually...

That said I'd be concerned about not getting security updates by running a legacy OS... Aren't you?

I shared my little security self-assessment a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23473839

Also in that comment thread, some thoughts on Mavericks vs Snow Leopard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23467082

UI-wise, I think macOS 10.4 is my favourite. There's just something really charming about the 2005-era Aqua design.

> Has anyone does this?

Yes, it's a common way to run GUI-based Kali Linux apps under Windows 10's Linux Subsystem.

I tried it. Performance was awful with the standard XQuartz client, especially scrolling, so I tried some alternatives: TigerVNC, X2Go, NoMachine, RDP. NoMachine had the best performance by far, RDP was decent. VNC and X2Go were too fiddly to setup for my.

Even with NoMachine the overall experience was clearly much worse than a native browser (mostly due to worse trackpad-scrolling).

Aw, that's disappointing! This was over wired lan?

I'm very surprised that standard render-remotely-and-send-pixels software was more effective than X forwarding, where the drawing is still done locally.

I tried it with a linux VM on the same Mac (specifically, 10.14 with fedora32 in under hyperkit and under qemu with accel=hvf).

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