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Rootless XFree On Mac OS X
Mr. McD writes: "The XonX project over at Source Forge is finally seeing some cool results. This time we finally have X windows running along side Aqua windows. See for yourself here and here. The author states that this release is not in a very usable form just yet. A post explaining how it was was done and how you too can run XonX can be found here. Finally!"
You are right on, but don't forget that the #1 design goal of the X Window System is to be "policy free" -- so not only is it based on lots of obsolete assumptions (not so bad), it never really solved most problems to begin with (worse).
In short it was a political comprimise made so that all the waring Unix and Minicomputer factions could at least agree on *something* that wouldn't get too much in the way of whatever proprietary shit they were building. And the open source Desktop Environment people have picked right up on this, building services into their DE instead of the underlying foundation where it belongs.
The long-and-short of it is that the X desktop is broken from a normal user standpoint, unless all of the apps they run are from the same vendor (er, project). Well, no shit - that was by design from the Commercial Unix forefathers. You want to use a standard clipboard between two apps. Sorry, that's policy. Printing? Policy. The same scrollbars on two different programs? Yup, Policy. How about "It works"? Wasn't that a policy that some people could agree on?
But, anyway, bitching is no good. X is what you have, and what you are going to have to live with until 2020 at least. Barring Apple open-sourcing Quartz/Aqua, that is.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
GTK+ will probably get a port to Aqua, at which point X on X would be worth much less than it is now.
Repeat for Qt, perhaps even Motif, etc.
-bugg
So it's true, OS X really is ahead of it's time.
Funny how when the PR guys say those things, they always make it sound like more than just two hours.
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Steve is going to FREAK!
:)
We're ugly-ing up his perty desktop with dirty old X apps
I can't wait to see if MacOS X will run reasonably fast on my LinuxPPC-running iMac.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Bill Gates arose and gazed upon the Aqua/XFree world and saw what it had to offer.
"I want this," he thought to himself, "I can make users around the world smile with delight by bringing them this."
And with that, Mr. Gates commanded his army of trained monkey programmers to create an innovative new interface secretly based on Aqua/XFree, but no one will notice, just like what they did for Windows 95.
Mr. Gates said, "All Your Innovations Are Belong To Us!"
And thus Windows XP was born.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
It's kinda funny that WindowMaker (which is affiliated with GNUstep (hence the logo at the top of the dock)) is running -- since GNUstep represents NeXT circa 1994, I suppose you can have three entirely separate generations of software running.
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