I was speaking to a Microsoft evangelist two years ago and asked him why it took them so long to release a new version of Windows. He essentially told me that Microsoft does the best legacy support in the world and wanted to ensure that every single piece of important software could still be installed and work with the new version. He also explained to me that Microsoft was not in the business of pushing new technology but that they were in the business of bringing it to the masses. It was his excuse for why IE was so much worse than Firefox or Chrome.
X11 missing from my computer was a simple google search away from a fix. It's not essential for 99.9% of Mac users and only developers and system admins would want it installed. They know how to use google.
To a company like Apple pushing technology is more important and supporting a fraction of users with something they can get on their own is spending time in the wrong place.
Barely different from trying to run Java software and getting the "You need Java, click here to install it" dialog box.
Apple may not be releasing X11 any more, but they made sure the experience was relatively simple. And give the number of people who actually use X11 (as a percentage of Mac users) it seems like a pretty fair decision.
Go ahead and open a bug report. I don't that this is expected behavior.
False. While I do make software and know how to handle situations like this, my other work is making light shows for concerts. I sometimes make use of a PC-based controller (Chamsys MagicQ PC) and recently had to borrow a Macbook to run it when I left my Thinkpad's power supply at a venue. The Mac version seems to be a port of the Linux version, itself a desktop port of the embedded software that runs their lighting consoles. It uses X11.
The experience of running it on a Mac was more or less like any other Mac software - it just had a longer startup time. Now, either the developers will have to modify it, or users will have a complicated series of steps to follow to get the software.
Sure, it's still an edge case, but Apple made the UX worse for some users here without making it better for others. That seems like a bad trade.
False. Seriously, you are blaming Apple because of program for which "The Mac version seems to be a port of the Linux version, itself a desktop port of the embedded software that runs their lighting consoles" which runs on X11?
There are genuine uses cases for X11, but users who can't figure out how to install it are at the very beginning of a gauntlet of pain. That Apple is not ushering them into the gauntlet seems, at best, neutral.
1. Get alert from OS that you need X11 to run this app.
2. Click link to get XQuartz
3. Install XQuartz
It's a one-time difficulty install that basically amounts to the same thing as a user installing Flash or Java on their computer. Just because some amount of users need something doesn't mean that Apple has to provide it.
I'm actually glad they made this change. In the past, XQuartz was sometimes ahead of the officially distributed version, which could be messy. Now they're the same thing.
For example, I've written some custom device drives for OS X that were installed in the system path (being kexts and all), those were removed. They weren't specifically compatible with OS X Mountain Lion, so it makes sense.
If it's always been included in the past, why wouldn't it be included now?
Maybe it's just me, but when I buy an "upgrade", I expect it to be a better version of what I already have.
Also, the installer didn't just not include X11, it actively removed the version he had installed. If the current install isn't compatible with Mountain Lion they could have popped up a message box or prompted him to upgrade the next time he ran an X app. There's no reason to delete things from his machine without telling him.
I really don't see an issue with this. It is not like it is completely removed (XQuartz BTW is completely open source, so if Apple stopped developing it someone else could pick it up).
> Also, the installer didn't just not include X11, it actively removed the version he had installed. If the current install isn't compatible with Mountain Lion they could have popped up a message box or prompted him to upgrade the next time he ran an X app. There's no reason to delete things from his machine without telling him.
Instead it removed the software, and on first run it told him he would need to download XQuartz which is available freely ... The old software is not compatible, leaving it in place could have caused issues. I don't see why the solution Apple used is so wrong, they clearly did present a popup and didn't just let it fail without errors.
But removing Java and X11 from the base install doesn't bother me as long as they remain easy enough to obtain afterwards for those of us that need them.
It is worth pointing out that X11.app is necessary for window management apps like Cinch[1] and Divvy[2]. The former simply reproduces Windows 7's "dragging to the edges to split/maximize" behavior. This is hardly deeply technical stuff. Both apps are available on the Mac App Store - but users need to jump through a painful DMG installation hoop to get their purchases to run.
[1] http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/cinch/ [2] http://mizage.com/divvy/
RSS removal is a different animal. Statistically speaking, no one used it (except you and me of course) but 10 minutes of app shopping and I've got a better solution running. Much better.
An application has requested access to X11.
Would you like to install X11 now?
X11 is no longer included with OS X. Apple continues to support
the development of X11 on OS X with the open source community.
Clicking “Continue” will take you to an Apple Knowledge Base Article
which provides information about installing X11.
[ Cancel ] [ Continue ]
I knew a lot of people with Macs in the late '90s, and most of them bought USB floppy drives.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Apple's Radar bug tracker had a few dozen bugs in Safari RSS, maybe even a potential DOS threat, and they chose to move on rather than allocating more resources to an unpopular feature.
What were those clear and straightforward benefits?
To the consumer, I mean; not to Apple.
Contrast that with the Dell box on my desk right now, which still has every physical port mentioned above, plus 2 PS/2 (!!!) plugs, an eSATA port, and an I-don't-know-what; the software running thereon (Windows) will _still_ run darned near everything I've accumulated over the last 30 years. ..._WHY_ do I want to run darned near everything I've accumulated over the last 30 years?
No wonder this two-cubic-foot boat anchor has a Geekbench score lower than a barely-there MacBook Air.
Edit: Oh ... got it now. Shit that was a woosh
Apple didn't do the best job of keeping up with some OSS components included in OS X. X11 is a great example of such a component. Outside of OS X, lots of changes were occurring with X windows servers. By including X11 (or even providing their own package), Apple was actually in the way. XQuartz dates back to 2007.
There were five releases in 2010 and 2011. By stepping out of the way, OS X users will have a more up to date version of X11 on their machines. That is a good thing™.
Apple has a well established history of quickly (some might say ruthlessly) depreciating and moving OS components and APIs forward. The upside of this is that developers don't have to experience the anguish associated with supporting several versions of sub-system for long. OS upgrades for the Mac are cheap and easy, so users tend to run closer to the front line. This is especially true for developers.
The downside is that you're frequently caught off guard. The change from Apple X11 to XQuartz is, definitively, a yak shaving exercise. Bleh.
The approach isn't without trade-offs. In other words, I try not to don my rose colored glasses prematurely, but I've spent enough time on all the major platforms to recognize that there are many advantages to the approach Apple uses here.
I kind of lost respect for the article at this point, Mail.app, really?
I see them removing built in support for X11 the same as them not bundling java. There probably isn't the corporate will to keep up to date on these packages and it is better to have groups that will keep them update maintaining them.
I stopped taking the author seriously around this point: the lack of package management outside of the App Store is a serious problem but the other two distractions are signs that he's either misconfigured his system or is doing something crazy like pasting data files rather than using pbcopy / pbpaste.
For long-time users, this is a minor change and actually a good move: there were only a couple of releases where we didn't have to install XQuartz anyway to get performance or features which weren't available in the shipped version. Since this affected only a very, very small number of generally more technical Mac users I'm not surprised that Apple is moving it back outside of the default release cycle.
XQuartz is X11.app. Percentage-wise, not many users needed X11 and the ones who do should be smart enough to follow the instructions they give to get XQuartz.
Apple effectively removed engineering redundancy. It allows for a more aggressive release cycle. Apple engineers still oversee XQuartz. Many of the main committers are Apple employees working on Apple's time, for example, Jeremy Huddleston.
I liken it more to the Java distribution transition as opposed to something like Messages.app obsoleting Mail.app.
X11 on OS X has always been, well, not that great and I use it fairly regularly for remote session testing and a few other bits and bobs. Apple wants someone else to keep it up to date for the people who need it to download it? Fine. Lets go down that route.
Apple is as committed to the terminal as they've ever been, which is to say it'll be there as long as there's developers and 'power users' on the system. If they do decide no longer to ship a terminal? There'll be other packages to do it. They can't rip the UNIX underpinnings out overnight.
Exactly this is my issue (not the rest of your comment, but this sentiment which I see everywhere since a couple years or so). Every time Apple drops support for anything, people talk about cleaning up, or the inevitable march of progress, or about how Microsoft is doomed because you can still install their OS on unworthy 32-bit boxen.
RSS support in mail hardly imposed any overhead on users. Why do we care about what Apple's programmers think or feel? These folks are paid to keep their apps running. Maintaining Cocoa apps is something that Apple can easily hire more people for (unlike hacking on the kernel, or on system frameworks).
And this is exactly the case with X11, it doesn't exist on OS X 10.8 by default but luckily the OS tells me Apple have an open source version ready for me to download when I need it.
This seems like the best of both worlds, an average computer user isn't bogged down by niche software shipped with their computer and the developer can easily hop onto MacForge and extend the functionality of their computer. Heck you can even compile things since it's just BSD/Mach underneath.
While I wouldn't want to defend Apple's decision to drop X11 support, I should note that X11 is a minority pursuit on that platform, the Apple X11 server never worked brilliantly (Apple's use of the Alt/Meta key mapping for accented characters made for a messy collision with X11 world), and if there's a more seamless screen sharing system built into the OS, why not go with the path of least resistance?
More and more, I've been finding myself picking up my 'other' laptop, firing up VirtualBox, and running Linux straight. I do miss the build quality of my MBP, though.
Projects that assume OS X are even worse. Homebrew, for example, hardcodes gcc as gcc-4.2. I tried working with gcc-4.7 (which is ridiculously easy to install using homebrew), but so many build recipes broke, that I had to just give up and reset to apple-gcc-4.2.
Most likely, both were user errors of some sort, but instead of spending a few hours trying to wade through homebrew recipes, I just decided to boot up ubuntu.
The article and some of his comments show a very narrow mindset. Thinking on how evil is every corporation, just for being a corporation.
Apple didn't include X11 in order to not tie the releases to certification and QA. In the other hand, many engineers on apple still work on XQuartz. Releasing more fast via the XQuartz
Everyone that really depended on it, has known for the last couple of years. And even beforehand talked about on the last rc's for Mountain Lion was a topic very active discussed with documentation readily available on Apple support site (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5293).
And the same narrow-minded people replying with comments "my TASCAM (any hardware really) doesn't work on ML", blame the hardware vendors, they did have many months to do testing and porting of software to the latest release or at least inform your customers. It wasnt like ML was a surprise release and the same will happen with Windows 8.
Years of blaming that could be solved by RTFM.
What is the value in giving a synopsis like this which is completely wrong? The author discusses his feelings a couple of times in the article, impugns Apple's motives not once, doesn't discuss corporatism, and uses the word "bad" precisely once to describe his experience here. He's not hyperbolic enough to use the word "evil," that was you.
Users who depend on both X11 and Apple's RSS support (all ten of them) are going to find this upgrade a bit of a pain. That's not reflective of a narrow mindset, it's reflective of an unusual use case.
Apple did inform, maybe in a way too opaque. But they did inform it.
On the topic of corporations. I may not interpret it as americans have the "corporations" rhetoric. But the feeling I have as a whole, from the author (Anthony and comments) was very paranoid.
Even calling the backend of OSX has "The Terminal" was very narrow on his scope to explain the problem of this trend and what we loose.
From where I see it, let XQuartz (partially supported/founded by Apple), Google (as seen on iOS6 Youtube.app removal), do it outside the OSX/iOS release schedule, even Apple did it for the iBooks apps and Podcast app.
Having old software stalling progress is just bad for all.
The upside of this, much like with Java and other similar unbundlings, is that updates to the software are no longer in lockstep with OS releases.
In the end, we get a lower likelihood of it being installed, but a higher likelihood that it's up to date.
When Apple introduced X11.app, I regarded it a tactic to get UNIX developers onto the platform. At the time, MacOS developers were sticking to Carbon like glue, and I think that by improving the POSIX compatibility and adding X11, Apple was trying to get other communities excited about OSX.
X11.app did not integrate well with OSX, let alone Apple's shrinkwrap vision of the Desktop. I'm not surprised to see they treat it like an optional add on package, and I am somewhat relieved to see it continue as an open source project with support and recognition by Apple. It's the right way to handle a legacy framework in my opinion.
As for the loss of RSS from Mail.app and Safari.app. Srsly? People use that who don't have a six paragraph definition for "semantic web"?
http://www4.macnn.com/macnn/articles/unixad.jpg
Now that the Apple no longer needs to be saved by dorks, the dorks are being thrown overboard.
For the record, I come from a hardcore Linux background (no Windows in my home ;)
Nicely handled by Apple, instead of permanently remove it and leave no trace, they shipped a "xstub" binary, symlinked all the binaries in /usr/X11/bin to it and make it show a clear way to install XQuartz.
IMHO, it is not a big deal, as some already pointed.
Some people just want an iOS experience - some people want to use the full depth and power of a general purpose computer.
Sort of. I've never done this myself.
It's undeniably what Jobs would do.
Another example of this way of thinking is that Apple apparently removed the web server software from Mountain Lion as well. As someone who builds LAMP sites for a living, this is fine with me because the Apple versions of AMP were always out of date or had some quirks. Everyone I know who develops for LAMP on Mac OS X runs MAMP or Virtual Box, not the software that ships with OS X.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Worksh...
Why can't we just go to Apple's website and install it if we want to?
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away"
I manage remote FreeBSD servers with just Terminal. It is perfectly fine. And I never copy and paste text in terminal windows.
