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Dumping Aqua On Mac OS X For X11?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the a-change-in-UI dept.

Sagefire asks: "Aqua is a beautiful interface but it can be incredibly resource intensive (especially for older/low-end machines). And, though the open source community has made great strides in reverse engineering proprietary drivers from Mac OS X, I would love to be able to simply keep using the drivers that came with it, for now. Since there is a fully functional BSD variant under the hood, is it possible (using X11.app, darwinports, and/or Fink) to boot to a command line and simply startx? Would it use less RAM to bypass Aqua?"

2 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. just install Linux by oohshiny · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are several Linux distros for Mac hardware, just install one of those. I'd give regular Ubuntu a choice, and if that's too heavy-weight, try Xubuntu.

    Ubuntu comes with a lot of software pre-installed, it feels a lot more responsive than OS X on the same hardware, and it has very much a Mac-like feel. I'm running it on an old iMac and have been quite happy with it.

  2. Re:Why not use a better OS to do this? by nxtw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A few years ago I compared OS X 10.2 and KDE 3 (YDL) on a G3 All in One, with perhaps a Rage 128 or some other ATI GPU with 2 or 4 MB of VRAM.

    With 256 and later 320MB RAM, KDE was much, much faster, by a long shot. It was a shock, since I'd long held the misconception that KDE/Gnome were slow (coming from the days of running Windows 95/NT vs. Gnome/KDE on old Pentiums with 64 MB of RAM).

    OS X did not support that machine's video card for any sort of acceleration, and there was no way to turn down the needless eye candy to a level that made the OS usable.

    OS X on that machine was slower than Windows 2000 with 48 MB of RAM.