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New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

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Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#11

Post by m463 »

codetrotter wrote: post #3

> Older builds required either a lot of hand-holding or Apple Internal tools, so this will hopefully be a step towards making it easier for others to drive future releases of XQuartz. If that is something you'd be interested in, please let me know. Sounds like they are planning on having the community take over responsibility for XQuartz. Nonetheless it’s great that they put in the work of bringing native Apple Silic…

> Sounds like they are planning on having the community take over responsibility for XQuartz.

I think that was their plan for most open source software, but xquartz is more critical than most.

Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#12

Post by m463 »

Lucasoato wrote: post #6

Is it related to Quartz composer?

quartz composer is completely different.

xquartz does the X11 protocol and displays it on apple display.

quartz composer is a sort of graphical composition tool.

They just happen to have quartz 2d graphics api in common.

Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#13

Post by FraKtus »

Lucasoato wrote: post #6

Is it related to Quartz composer?

From very far.

Quartz Composer is a graph of filers that you can interconnect in a graphical interface. You use it to create visual filters or generators. iTunes was using Quartz composer files .qtz for some of his music visualizers.

Quartz Composer is GPU accelerated thanks to its use of the Quartz API.

It was very popular with artists because of the creative freedom it gave when composing the filters. You did not need to be a developer to create a filter, thanks to the editing application.

Quartz Composer is now deprecated and dying in slow and anonymous death.

XQuartz is a windowing system accelerated with Quartz. The X system was not invented by Apple but very popular on top of Unix.

Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#14

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

jcelerier wrote: post #10
alexhutcheson wrote: post #5

Wow. The previous release was in 2016, so I was sure that XQuartz was dead for good. Nice to be pleasantly surprised! I occasionally use XQuartz to run graphical programs over SSH using X forwarding, although I’ve mostly moved on to other approaches due to a combination of: 1. Bad support for HiDPI displays (theoretically fixable in XQuartz - curious if they will tackle it now). 2. Annoyingly high input and redisplay…

hm, I'm using X11 forwarding when I'm on my mac box to control my music player and there is pretty much no latency (and text isn't a blurry mess like rdp / vnc but crisp and sharp). I'm on a gigabit network though.

X11 was designed at a time when local networks carried only a few megabits per second. But apps back then didn't depend on sending lots of bitmaps over the wire, just mostly drawing primitives.

Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#15

Post by mleo »

jcelerier wrote: post #10
alexhutcheson wrote: post #5

Wow. The previous release was in 2016, so I was sure that XQuartz was dead for good. Nice to be pleasantly surprised! I occasionally use XQuartz to run graphical programs over SSH using X forwarding, although I’ve mostly moved on to other approaches due to a combination of: 1. Bad support for HiDPI displays (theoretically fixable in XQuartz - curious if they will tackle it now). 2. Annoyingly high input and redisplay…

hm, I'm using X11 forwarding when I'm on my mac box to control my music player and there is pretty much no latency (and text isn't a blurry mess like rdp / vnc but crisp and sharp). I'm on a gigabit network though.

Local network of VPN? My first attempt at running IntelliJ across VPN last year was using XQuartz and it worked, but latency was terrible and when changing connectivity it would die. Using VNC allowed the process to keep running in the server session over periods of weeks.

Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#16

Post by derefr »

Question: running GTK apps in a Linux VM under Parallels in “coherence mode” provides a better user-experience (in several ways: smoother, better accessibility, etc.) than running a native-macOS-compiled GTK apps under XQuartz does. Why is this?

• Is it a difference of display model? Where/when compositing is done? Is X11 really that high-overhead of a protocol, that putting a “compositor in your compositor” like Parallels’ video driver does, can do better?

• Is it that macOS GTK apps are relying on macOS as the window manager / window decorator (which those apps were never heavily tested for), while “coherence mode” GTK apps are bringing their own DE (GNOME or what-have-you) along with them onto the macOS desktop, which “knows” what to do with those apps much better?

• Something else I’m not thinking of?

Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#17

Post by tom_ »

jcelerier wrote: post #10
alexhutcheson wrote: post #5

Wow. The previous release was in 2016, so I was sure that XQuartz was dead for good. Nice to be pleasantly surprised! I occasionally use XQuartz to run graphical programs over SSH using X forwarding, although I’ve mostly moved on to other approaches due to a combination of: 1. Bad support for HiDPI displays (theoretically fixable in XQuartz - curious if they will tackle it now). 2. Annoyingly high input and redisplay…

hm, I'm using X11 forwarding when I'm on my mac box to control my music player and there is pretty much no latency (and text isn't a blurry mess like rdp / vnc but crisp and sharp). I'm on a gigabit network though.

Depends on the program! - I've never minded using Emacs that way, even just over wifi, but a lot of more modern stuff is basically unusable. (I assume these programs draw everything to a local buffer, and then copy that to the screen. Probably fine locally, and I'm sure you do get more control, but it's a lot of data to go over a network!)
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