X.Org is now pretty much an ex-org: Maintainer declares the open-source windowing system largely abandoned

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[–]Vulptex 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (13 children)

By all means X11 seems like it's not exactly optimal, and yet it still gives me noticeably better performance than Windows or Mac.

[–]TaseAFeminist4Jesus 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Yes, that is part of my confusion!

[–]are 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (11 children)

I doubt current X11 is at all "optimal":

stackoverflow.com/questions/4630104/need-help-understanding-x11-window-hierarchy-and-drawing-commands

its a chatty disorganized mess for its layering model

The Mac has about 20 predefined rendering compositing layers (including mouse cursor, screen saver, login window, etc), and user code can draw into any of them if needed. Apple supports zero monitors or even multiple monitors, for over 30 years! In 1991 you could stretch any window across 6 big monitors in one mac using 6 graphics cards and not all monitors needed the same color depth. It still can 30 years later.

THERE IS NO SUCH WORD AS "XWINDOWS" it is called "The X Window System"

Look it up in any real reference book if you doubt me.

MOTIF on X11 at least looked nice, as did Open Motif

They all then strongly tried to copy the Mac looks

[–]Vulptex 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

Mac crashes like 5x more often than Windows and Linux and was always really slow for me. Mac has some specialty areas where it offers optimal performance, but everything else doesn't work well. Not to mention that it's such a locked-down OS that it's barely usable. And despite all of this, it costs 1000x more than every other system. The only thing Apple products have going for them is the brand. It's a complete and total ripoff. I switched to Linux once Microsoft started going in the same direction and forced Windows 10 on everyone.

X11 I know isn't optimal. But despite this, it still manages to work better than plenty of other window managers with algorithms that should outperform it, meaning something's not right with them.

[–]are 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

locked-down OS that it's barely usable

Wrong! It has a full blown real unix system for those that want to use it at that level.

And despite all of this, it costs 1000x more than every other system

WRONG. Nothing is as cheap as a macintosh per multiply-addition from and back to ram. NOTHING. Look at any benchmark of a M1 Ultra Mac Studio 2022:

  • 21 teraflop GPU/APU
  • 800GB/s of memory bandwidth to/from 128GB of memory
  • 20-core CPU, 64-core GPU, and 32-core Neural Engine

Mac crashes like 5x more often than Windows and Linux

Thats so untrue, now I know all you wrote was just nonsense.

The beloved Macintosh made Apple the biggest Company in the history of Earth valued at a $2.5 trillion dollar market cap!:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=aapl&ia=stock

Apple products are the best value for anyone who is not a pauper and values their TIME, not just their money.

That is why Apple is a bigger company than Microsoft.

[–]LarrySwinger2 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

They do overcharge for the hardware. You can pick a product from the Apple store and then increase the specs from the default setup, and you will notice that they charge ridiculous amounts for a bit of extra RAM, much more than those chips cost, and it's the same with storage. It doesn't help that so much is soldered on and you can't upgrade easily at a later point, so you're pushed to increase the specs and spend much more than you otherwise would.

[–]Vulptex 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

A few Linux distros are "certified" unixes. The rest care more about functionality than conforming to some old standard. Mac itself only went through the effort to get certified due to some licensing issue, it wasn't always so.

Macs are like 5x the price for the same hardware, and both the operating system and the hardware are so restricted that it doesn't even feel like your device. It feels like a school or work computer. Apple barely tolerates you doing anything they don't specifically approve of, and they've tried to get people executed for jailbreaking their devices, and they want you to use ONLY Apple products and will do anything they can to force you to. It's a scam unless you're using it for its niches.

[–]are 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I explained to you, and you do not understand , that to achieve the same level of multiply-adds of large floats per second TO AND FROM RAM, gigabytes of values, a Mac is CHEAPER than any known PC. The reason is Apples memory design and chip design for computation (its used 5 nanometer for years, and in a couple months will offer parts of chip at 3 nanometers).

The fastest laptop from now on will probably always be a Mac.

Poor people make up lies about the worlds largest company in history... Apple. 2.5 trillion dollars built on quality products.

[–]LarrySwinger2 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

You can build a Hackintosh so that you don't pay a penny too much. It requires some initial effort, but then you get a stable system. MacOS has never crashed on me, not once. And X11 is a windowing system, not a window manager.

Not to mention that it's such a locked-down OS that it's barely usable.

It isn't locked down in any way. You're free to install whatever programs are available. There are lots of commercial applications available, there are people who develop open-source applications for it, and it's unix beneath the hood. There are three different projects that port GNU/Linux programs to macOS, namely Homebrew, Finch, and Macports. It's actually less hassle to get those programs running on macOS than it is on GNU/Linux itself.

[–]Vulptex 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I don't buy that for a second. Maybe it's different if you have a Hackintosh, which FYI Apple would hang you for, but Apple products do not give you any freedom. Your system is the way Apple wants it, end of discussion. Customizing Windows is hard enough, but Mac makes it look like a piece of cake.

Linux can run not only UNIX programs, but also most Windows programs, in addition to making it super easy to do pretty much anything you want with it. It's also like 5000x faster than both Mac and Windows, and it's more relevant than UNIX these days, so all the "standard" tools are native to it. Most servers even have a Linux distribution on them, including this website in fact, because it just works best. In the near future probably everything else will fall into irrelevance.

[–]LarrySwinger2 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

which FYI Apple would hang you for

They've never sued anyone merely for using Hackintosh, let alone instructing others how to do it. They only sue when you try to sell a hackintoshed machine. Either way, the EU forbids companies from determining what a user can and cannot do with software that they have acquired legally. MacOS itself is free, so that's all good. I wish Apple good luck trying to override the fucking EU.

MacOS runs just fine for me, including on the Thinkpad X220, which is a laptop from 2011. If you buy modern, compatible hardware, you aren't going to have a problem with it. I use both OSes and find that macOS provides a full DE while still feeling lightweight. In GNU/Linux there's an option between lightweight and heavier environments, and I experience stutters with the latter, specifically when I enable compositing on KDE. I'm glad GNU/Linux works for you, though.

You're right about servers, I'm not contending with that. Note that I'm not arguing macOS is an overall better system.

[–]WoodyWoodPecker 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

The X Window System was released in 1985 and developed on Unix at the same time as Apple did the Macintosh project. Steve Jobs used The X Windows for NeXT and now it is part of macOS.

[–]LarrySwinger2 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

MacOS uses Aqua. It's possible to run X.org on it, but it's in no way part of the system.

[–]are 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

No. NeXT was written in Objective C and unrelated to the X Window System. In fact it used DISPLAY POSTSCRIPT and lacked pixels. Pixels were each floating point rectangles (yes rectangles, not squares). To draw a perfect circle on a NeXT, a oval was rendered , deep down in the drawing code!

UNRELATED!