Imagine if Apple removes [the floppy drive] itself in the next version of [the Mac], or decides [wi-fi] is the future and gets rid of [the Ethernet port]?
Imagine if [fanboy] doesn't cherry pick from the last 20 years and talks about the [article].
X11 and the disturbing trend of Apple removing functionality from OS X
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Re: X11 and the disturbing trend of Apple removing functionality from OS X
#12X11 never really fit in anyway. It was nearly always a special extra package to add in, and frequently lagged behind the open source effort they sponsored.
The upside of this, much like with Java and other similar unbundlings, is that updates to the software are no longer in lockstep with OS releases.
In the end, we get a lower likelihood of it being installed, but a higher likelihood that it's up to date.
Re: X11 and the disturbing trend of Apple removing functionality from OS X
#13Re: X11 and the disturbing trend of Apple removing functionality from OS X
#14The trend only appears disturbing if you few it from a very, very high level.
Apple didn't do the best job of keeping up with some OSS components included in OS X. X11 is a great example of such a component. Outside of OS X, lots of changes were occurring with X windows servers. By including X11 (or even providing their own package), Apple was actually in the way. XQuartz dates back to 2007.
There were five releases in 2010 and 2011. By stepping out of the way, OS X users will have a more up to date version of X11 on their machines. That is a good thing™.
Re: X11 and the disturbing trend of Apple removing functionality from OS X
#15interestingly, X11 is part of the "open sourced" part ( almost all of the UNIX underpinnings ) of OS X. Can you change what goes into the distribution CD provided by ubuntu ?
Re: X11 and the disturbing trend of Apple removing functionality from OS X
#16One can only hope the developers inside Apple still enjoy using the terminal and "unix subsystem" in their work, enough to keep these things going into the future. I mean, xcode still needs to shell out to run gcc/llvm/clang, right?
I'm not sure that it does. In fact the Mountain Lion upgrade deleted the command line toolchain from my machine. I had to go into Xcode and manually tell it to re-download the "Command Line Tools" optional extension.
That's just the stuff that goes in /usr/bin, right? Aren't the files always present in /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin etc.?
Re: X11 and the disturbing trend of Apple removing functionality from OS X
#17The trend only appears disturbing if you few it from a very, very high level. Apple didn't do the best job of keeping up with some OSS components included in OS X. X11 is a great example of such a component. Outside of OS X, lots of changes were occurring with X windows servers. By including X11 (or even providing their own package), Apple was actually in the way. XQuartz dates back to 2007. There were five releases…
That's a good argument for Apple not including their own version of x11. But the author was most anguished that they removed an installation of x11 that he was depending on.
Re: X11 and the disturbing trend of Apple removing functionality from OS X
#18The X11 that Apple provided with OS X was nothing but a snapshot of whatever XQuartz version was current when that version of OS X went GM. In other words, we are now getting the exact same product, but with more timely updates. It takes a special brand of cluelessness to see that as a bad thing.
Re: X11 and the disturbing trend of Apple removing functionality from OS X
#19Whilst Apple removing an application without informing the user is bad, them not shipping things that are less used is a good thing. RSS I'm sure had at least 10 users, but it was an unneeded overhead in two applications.
X11 on OS X has always been, well, not that great and I use it fairly regularly for remote session testing and a few other bits and bobs. Apple wants someone else to keep it up to date for the people who need it to download it? Fine. Lets go down that route.
Apple is as committed to the terminal as they've ever been, which is to say it'll be there as long as there's developers and 'power users' on the system. If they do decide no longer to ship a terminal? There'll be other packages to do it. They can't rip the UNIX underpinnings out overnight.