Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Guy Sotomayor Jr]

> On Oct 23, 2018, at 11:12 AM, Jim Manley <jim.manley at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 3:59 PM Guy Sotomayor Jr <ggs at shiresoft.com <mailto:ggs at shiresoft.com>> wrote:
> An (optional) X server (and clients) can be added to the OS (I use them all the time) but
> is not part of the base install ...
> 
> Wrong.  Apple has been using self-customized, optimized-for their-hardware supersets of the VNC protocol (which is X based) for Screen Sharing since early versions of OS X, if not from the beginning, and It's (still) In There (per Prego spaghetti sauce ads) in the latest versions of OS X.  I do have some first-gen PowerPC systems that I need to see if they power up (ironic name, PowerPC!), let alone boot, and then I'll have to find original OS X boot media ... some of us have actual lives, though, so don't hold your breath!

That’s distinct from the X server and apps that are available as a separate download (and I believe that now they point to Xorg).

> 
> BTW, the X server on OS X, interfaces not to the bit-map but instead to the
> native OS X display rendering framework.
> 
> That's not possible, at least when communicating cross-platform, where bitmaps are the only representation.  Projects such as Wayland and Weston are attempting to provide a modern alternative to X that fully supports vector representations (using GPU hardware acceleration), through a protocol and supporting library for a compositing window manager (Wayland) and a compositor reference implementation (Weston).  XWayland implements a compatibility layer to seamlessly run legacy X11 applications on Wayland.  A few years ago, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was funding this effort, in part, but it was too soon then, and I don't know what the statuses of the projects are, at this point, although instructions for building the software for Linux are Out There.  Support for Retina and HiDPI displays is mentioned, but I didn't see anything explicitly about OS X or Windows support in a cursory scan of the associated wikis - I assume they're talking about running Wayland/Weston on Linux using Apple and PC hardware.  GNOME and KDE are fully supported, since that's where development started.

*sigh*

Yes, it is.  Just as there exist X implementations that use the GPU to accelerate rendering.  It says *nothing* about the cross platform protocol.  It’s how the X server communicates with the rendering hardware or in OS X’s case the software interface to do the rendering.  As far as OS X is concerned, X is just another OS X application that wants to render to the screen.  I use it all the time and it works well along side the normal OS X applications which wouldn’t be possible if the X server wrote directly to the HW.

TTFN - Guy