Apple Shipped An X11 Server On Mac OS X??

X11 nowadays is the aging display technology of Linux but it's been around a lot longer than Linux has been and there was a time where MacOS even pre Mac OS X would ship an X11 server.

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#Apple #MacOS #X11 #OpenSource #FOSS

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[BrodieRobertson]

If you're seeing this video labelled as League of Legends, spam YouTube support to fix the website. This video isn't in the gaming category and I literally cannot change that

[MechMK]

I remember being a kid playing with this X11 app and having zero idea what the point of a blank white window was.

[brmolnar]

I did a semester abroad at Sydney Uni. During my time there, you were limited to about 10mb web browsing per day. After that, you could switch to the other proxy server and you had to pay per mb downloaded (non-AU servers were close to $1/mb). Using X11 forwarding on an old PowerBook (it may have been running YellowDog or SuSE Linux or OSX I don't remember) I would connect to the Math/CS department Solaris cluster and get another 30mb. When this ran out, I found out that the traffic limit was only for web traffic, not SSH traffic (but SSH only from a University computer, because they charged $5/month to have normal SSH, but Math/CS students got it for free). I used X11 forwarding to connect to a computer in upstate New York or Delaware and could keep browsing.

[thenemesis]

I still regularly use XQuartz to receive X11 forwarding from a Raspberry Pi I have connected on the same network for remote access. It's very useful for certain situations which require me to use the GUI and it stops me from having to use VNC to connect to it with a GUI.

[thingsiplay]

Finally the name OS X makes sense. Edit: 20 years later Apple replaces X11 with Wayland.

[mikhail-glinka]

**see basic unix thing on a unix system**
linux users: omg is that a linux reference ?!?!?!?!?!

[xard]

Some applications like Open Office and Inkscape for a very long time required the use of X11 app. There were some quirks with the implementation related to floating windows but for now I can't remember the specifics.

[ThatLinuxDude]

Wait, people don't know this?

Even I knew this so many years back as a kid, and I've barely ever touched macOS, period, until getting an actual macOS device this year.
Next thing you'll tell me is people don't know Mac OS X had a BSD Subsystem.

[PaulEmsley]

Thanks Jeremy, I've been using X11 on Mac OS since the beginning - and my app still uses it today (well, one of the branches does (the other has moved over to GTK4)).

[notuxnobux]

Many people dont know that xorg server also supports windows. I have run xfce on windows before.

[OneSpaceyBoy]

New Drinking game: Drink a sip of water evertime you hear X

[thetechq]

I used it back in the day. You could use it for apps like Gimp which did not initially have a port.

[blendernoob]

Back when I was teething my computer knowledge, I remember getting an ms paint clone for Mac OS leopard on the family iMac. I remember seeing an icon with a white square and an X and thought, what was that? It wasn’t until I started using Linux that I realized that was x11 running on my Mac!

[BaronCAD]

Yes, I used XQuartz daily on my macbook from 2008-2016 as I was working my way through grad school (at the time I was also working on a mobile app for a company I had started with my brother, and Apple requires you to be ON a mac to build for iOS, no cross compiling allowed). It was the easiest way to forget that I was being forced to use a mac laptop. I was able to remote X login into the harvard cs lab machines and test+submit all my code for classes like compilers, unix system programming, etc... Made it easy to make sure the TAs could build and test my projects on the first try, since I was often building and running on the same exact machine as they eventually would. It also was helpful administering my own home network server(s).

[slebetman]

I was using it to run Inkscape. I still sometimes use it to run GUI apps on my Linux box remotely on my Mac

[jktolford]

Used both. For a while it was the only way to use Inkscape on the Mac.

[mashygreen]

I’ve been using X11 and XQuartz on and off over the years. I use a lot of scientific software and a significant number do not have a proper GUI and rely on very crude X11 visuals to draw ‘something’, like simple meshes or plots.

I couldn’t live without it when I was mainly working on macOS between 2008-2014 or so. I also wrote CUDA code on a MacBook Pro from 2012-2014 when they still had Nvidia GPUs. They were quite capable and general laptops back then!

[learningbird]

The X in Mac OS X is the Roman numeral 10. After Mac OS 7, 8 and 9. The 10 series ended with Big Sur, which was 11.

[CharlesSchaum]

Wow, that takes me back. I used the various metioned X11 offerings for Mac OS X in a time when I was in the publishing space during the Naughties. Among other things, I was looking at various alternate workflows that would get one from substantive edits to page proofs (XML/LaTeX) trying to leverage the economics of open source (for which I was chastened by the corporate-think types) instead of having designers whack things together by hand in either Quark Xpress or Adobe InDesign (although my first fling with DTP was Aldus PageMaker on the Mac in the 80s). I ended up using MacTex and looking up an XML workflow from Scribe that used Word as a front end, an XML database as a central repo, and InDesign or LaTeX as a backend. But many brick-and-mortar publishers are Luddites and fanatical/religious about whatever old corporate tech they use, IMO.

[thingsiplay]

Why is this video marked as League of Legends related content under the description of this video?