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 latency (probably not fixable, just an inherent property of the very chatty X protocol).
Still nice to have the option.
Unless there's a program specific to your environment that is causing this, I would say that this is partially fixable. There's some kind of bug/weird implementation detail in the macOS vsync driver that causes massive lag in XQuartz.app and macports' X11.app.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaPh4tc0_B0
If you use XQuartz regularly, I would highly recommend you install Quartz Debug.app so you can disable vsync before you hop into X.
https://download.developer.apple.com/Developer_Tools/Additio...
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.
Sounds like they are planning on having the community take over responsibility for XQuartz. Nonetheless it’s great that they put in the work of bringing native Apple Silicon support and making a build system for it that others can use.
Anyways I personally much more rarely need XQuartz now than before, but it’s good to have it be available still if and when you need it.
Either that, or they realised that it would be literally impossible to build it on Apple Silicon, if the hand holding became not possible and the internal tools not available.
I think that was their plan for most open source software, but xquartz is more critical than most.
And then Tom Lane is the first person to weigh in to give thanks?! How do these people manage the breadth of contribution that they do?
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.
Quartz on the other hand, the actual supported API, has over time outclassed Xlib in almost every conceivable way.
• 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 Parallels’ video driver does, can do better?
• Is it that macOS GTK apps are relying on macOS as the window manager / window decorator (which those apps were never heavily tested for), while “coherence mode” GTK apps are bringing their own DE (GNOME or what-have-you) along with them onto the macOS desktop, which “knows” what to do with those apps much better?
• Something else I’m not thinking of?
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.
Quartz Composer is a graph of filers that you can interconnect in a graphical interface. You use it to create visual filters or generators. iTunes was using Quartz composer files .qtz for some of his music visualizers.
Quartz Composer is GPU accelerated thanks to its use of the Quartz API.
It was very popular with artists because of the creative freedom it gave when composing the filters. You did not need to be a developer to create a filter, thanks to the editing application.
Quartz Composer is now deprecated and dying in slow and anonymous death.
XQuartz is a windowing system accelerated with Quartz. The X system was not invented by Apple but very popular on top of Unix.
xquartz does the X11 protocol and displays it on apple display.
quartz composer is a sort of graphical composition tool.
They just happen to have quartz 2d graphics api in common.
opens fine on 10.15 - identical md5
Though they did manage in the end - latest one was Nov. 2020 - the person who did it said it would be his last https://www.cairographics.org/news
