Microsoft-Paul Allen

[Jim Manley]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 3:59 PM Guy Sotomayor Jr <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!

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.