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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

#21

Post by swiley »

A surprising number of features exist in OSX to make it comfortable for people used to Unix-like OSes. It's a shame Apple is so poorly behaved, I'd think about buying a personal mac if it weren't for that.

Their terminal app will simulate a selection buffer for you (although it doesn't integrate with other apps which is why I end up pasting garbage into my terminal almost every time I clone something from github) and can optionally simulate pointer style focus like many X11 window managers do.

Every text widget in Cocoa seems to use Emacs-style GNU readline shortcuts. Something I didn't notice until recently.

Xquartz isn't dead, and interestingly Xlib has outlasted quickdraw and carbon, their own drawing APIs.

Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#22

Post by jcelerier »

tom_ wrote: post #17
jcelerier wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

in my case it's Strawberry which is a modern Qt 5 app. I also tried retroarch that way and it works surprisingly well.

Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#23

Post by asveikau »

derefr wrote: post #16

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 Par…

I wouldn't discount the extent to which a Linux distro might tweak some config files and optional dependencies.

An example: when I started using freebsd on a laptop the fonts were pretty crappy relative to Linux. The code for Xorg, freetype etc. were identical in both places. I spent some time editing config files and it looked decent again. I assume my debian setup just had better defaults.

Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#26

Post by zepto »

swiley wrote: post #21

A surprising number of features exist in OSX to make it comfortable for people used to Unix-like OSes. It's a shame Apple is so poorly behaved, I'd think about buying a personal mac if it weren't for that. Their terminal app will simulate a selection buffer for you (although it doesn't integrate with other apps which is why I end up pasting garbage into my terminal almost every time I clone something from github) and…

quickdraw and carbon were explicitly presented as legacy APIs when OSX was introduced and were supported for backwards compatibility reasons.

Quartz on the other hand, the actual supported API, has over time outclassed Xlib in almost every conceivable way.

Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#27

Post by coldtea »

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…

>The previous release was in 2016, so I was sure that XQuartz was dead for good.

Why though? It's not like the XWindows protocol changes that much (or at all).

Having to do a new release for a new architecture like Apple Sillicon, sure, but that's another thing.

Re: New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

#29

Post by zymhan »

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…

Indeed, I was amazed when I installed it today and it popped up the Beta update dialog when I launched it. Happy to see it's not abandoned.
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