Apple Removes X11 in OS X Mountain Lion, Shifts Support to Open Source XQuartz | Hacker News Reader

Apple Removes X11 in OS X Mountain Lion, Shifts Support to Open Source XQuartz

macrumors.com

120 pointspooriaazimi46 comments

The title is a bit unclear. Up through Lion, Apple bundled XQuartz to provide X11 support. Going forward, they will no longer do so. Instead you'll have to download and install the XQuartz binary separately. Apple will continue to support XQuartz as an open source project. There will just no longer be an "official" Apple version.

[Edit: why would someone downvote this?]

Off topic, but asking about downvotes is rarely productive. It'll almost always fix itself given time.

> There will just no longer be an "official" Apple version.

Even that's overstating it -- there will still be an "official" Apple version, written by Apple employees and automatically installed when it's needed; it just won't be on most users' machines.

You have been downvoted because many people on HN base their votes on whether they like the message of a comment. People who like Apple products and can identify with the values of the company will feel you're defending Apple with your comment and will upvote you for doing so. Other people who like X11 or XQuartz a lot or simply dislike Apple will feel that you're trying to defend an evil act and will downvote your comment in retribution. I'm not sure how helpful this voting pattern is for the quality of HN discussions but it's basic human nature and there's not much that can be done about it.

I've had the idea in the back of my head for a while now to build a new facade UI for HN that completely hides the surface evidence of the entire karma system, which has come to be used in an increasingly childish and reflexive manner.

Informative comment from Jeremy Huddleston (XQuartz developer): http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=14341845#post14...

I think it's a good move from Apple's part.

It's not uncommon for users that rely on X11 support to update to the latest XQuartz release by themselves, anyway. Perhaps this will even bring more attention to the project, which is always good.

It's also one less thing for them to worry about, since they're moving to a faster release cycle.

Now, IMO, most people that need XQuartz need it to run GTK apps, like the GIMP. Is there a technical reason why GTK doesn't support OS X natively? Or is it only because noone ever did it, really? Perhaps now that can also happen?

It would be really nice to have GTK apps using the menu bar and displaying native OS X widgets.

http://www.gtk.org/download/macos.php

There's been a Quartz backend for GTK+ for quite some time. Working GIMP builds for native OSX have been available since 2011, and for most projects it's just a matter of finicking with the build system until it works.

Huh, I guess that'd change the question to one of: why doesn't MacPorts ship a native gimp?

Macports does ship a non x11 gimp. It is the quartz variant.

Actually GTK does have a Quartz backend. It's just likely that the programs compiled aren't using it.

http://www.gtk.org/download/macos.php

Is it just me, or is Macrumors by far the best Apple-news aggregator out there? Their reporting is clean, straight-forward and thorough (e.g. I wasn't aware that X11 was important for scientists). They present the rumors and their validity(looking at past rumors and the sources) and that's it. No non-sense subjective babbling like you see on apple-insider.

Sorry for the derail, it's just something i've been noticing. I wish more people would like to them.

> Is it just me, or is Macrumors by far the best Apple-news aggregator out there?

Ars Technica's Infinite Loop section is very good in my experience, they don't tend to do rumor as much and their coverage is usually good and informed.

appleinsider's quality varies a lot and it has lots of terrible writers who really don't know jack (Prince McLean for instance, really should quit the internet altogether), and the 9to5 network is just garbage all around, with 9to5mac being the Apple-scenting of that garbage.

They're certainly not bad (and what I subscribe to in RSS) when one considers the field.

A lot of it is very US-centric and some of the 'rumours' aren't very news-worthy (the numerous stories on dock connectors for the iPad 3 come to mind) but it's far more like a news site that works mostly on facts (well, as close to facts as rumours can come) than mere speculation and conjecture. Arn, the guy who runs it, is an MD which might explain the difference to an extent.

Yep, and longtime HNer

Haha, hi there! Perhaps I was a little harsh in my comment - I really do like your site.

nah. No worries, I didn't take it harshly at all. ;)

Hey man, hope you enjoy the props :)

1. What's an MD? A doctor of medicine, as my dictionary suggests?

2. There's certainly a lot more personality shining through the posts of Jordan Golson. Just an observation.

Keep up the good work!

1. yep. medical doctor. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/technology/21blogger.html 2. yes, I know. :) he's adjusting.

Apple seems to be taking another turn towards open source software. The spinning off of the cli build tools into an smaller package makes like easier for tools like homebrew and fink. Supporting projects like this is a very good sign.

Well, they've been supporting XQuartz since at least 2007...

Can we please calm down? All that happened is that they will no longer bundle an old version of XQuartz with every new release of OSX, which is probably a good thing because it will probably make it less hacky to install a newer version.

How many Mac users actually use X? I assume a fraction of the audience of HN does, but, again, the last time I used X on a Mac it was on a PPC G3.

Inkscape only runs via X on Mac.

Witch is terrible unfortunate.

You can't use copy paste because it copies a raster version instead of a vector one.

This makes inkscape totally unusable. I tried to compile a native GTK version but letters and icons will appear as little boxes. It was more useful that way that the X version(at least this way you could guess what the boxes were).

Hm, copy & paste inside Inkscape worked for me well.

There's an easy fix:

http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ#Copying_and_past...

Note:

  However, this will also prevent copying text from any
  X11 application to Mac OS X ones. It will not prevent
  copying text from OS X to X11.

But:

  When you just want to make a copy of an object within
  Inkscape, you should use duplicate (Ctrl-D) rather than
  copy/paste (Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V). Duplicate does not interact
  with the X11/OSX clipboards.

Matlab requires X.

Doesn't everyone use XQuartz anyway?

The X11 that comes with Lion is XQuartz anyway.

All this changes is that the first time you run an application that uses X11 a dialog box pops up directing you to the XQuartz project page.

This is actually probably good news. Was it 10.4 that shipped with a broken version of XQuartz and we had to go download the new version anyway? I know it was a rather annoying issue back when I used OS X more frequently.

Yep, to be honest this is the exact same thing they did for java. Try to use java in Lion, blam pops up a window asking to install it.

Seems like they're just trimming the base OS install down to what is used by most users. I'll put this in the meh category.

After hitting the install button it worked seamlessly as well, so Java no longer being bundled was not even an issue :-)

It could be a bit smoother, though. When you launch Java you just have to click twice (once to install, a second time to accept the terms), wait a few seconds until it downloads and installs, and you are done. Everyone can do that, it’s smooth and it’s nearly impossible to go wrong.

When you start X11 you get a similar dialog, but it currently sends you to a website where you have to download stuff. That’s not the same.

It’s no big deal, really, but it could be smoother.

In the cases of Flash and Java, possibly also trying to disclaim responsibility. We often see statistics about security holes in MacOS vs Windows; those made based on Snow Leopard or earlier tend to include Flash and Java security holes for MacOS but not Windows, because, while most OEM Windows devices do ship Flash and a JVM, Microsoft does not.

XQuartz comes bundled with every OSX install disk. That doesn't mean people use it. My mother and my wife probably have it installed, but I doubt they ever heard of X or used it.

Does Xquartz install the launchd component that listens on /etc/launch*/org.x and then launches the app on demand?

I hope divvy is not affected by this. They are using X11 API.

So in future, users will be prompted to install XQuartz, rather than using the rather antique version of XQuartz which currently comes with MacOS.

Would be nice to have an official package manager. Or better yet Debian under the hood.

We're all X11 users, now.

The biggest effect this has for me is that I'll now need to find a good replacement for Wireshark.

No, you won't. You'll just have to download and install XQuartz from http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/Releases

Why? You'll still be able to download XQuartz and it'll work the same.

Though http://www.tastycocoabytes.com/cpa/index.php is ok for very basic stuff.

Better, actually. XQuartz is well ahead of X11 at this point.

I was going to make a joke about someone doing a web based wireshark but it looks like someone actually bothered doing that.. http://cloudshark.org/ go figure.

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