New Xquartz release with native Apple Silicon support

Wow. The previous release was in 2016, so I was sure that XQuartz was dead for good. Nice to be pleasantly surprised!<p>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:<p>1. Bad support for HiDPI displays (theoretically fixable in XQuartz - curious if they will tackle it now).<p>2. Annoyingly high input and redisplay latency (probably not fixable, just an inherent property of the very chatty X protocol).<p>Still nice to have the option.

&gt; Older builds required either a lot of hand-holding or Apple Internal tools, so this will hopefully be a step towards making it easier for others to drive future releases of XQuartz. If that is something you&#x27;d be interested in, please let me know.<p>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.<p>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.

Awesome. Something about this post really hits home about the amazing people working quietly behind the scenes chipping away to keep everything running.<p>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?

A surprising number of features exist in OSX to make it comfortable for people used to Unix-like OSes. It&#x27;s a shame Apple is so poorly behaved, I&#x27;d think about buying a personal mac if it weren&#x27;t for that.<p>Their terminal app will simulate a selection buffer for you (although it doesn&#x27;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.<p>Every text widget in Cocoa seems to use Emacs-style GNU readline shortcuts. Something I didn&#x27;t notice until recently.<p>Xquartz isn&#x27;t dead, and interestingly Xlib has outlasted quickdraw and carbon, their own drawing APIs.

Question: running GTK apps in a Linux VM under Parallels in “coherence mode” provides a better user-experience (in several ways: smoother, better accessibility, etc.) than running a native-macOS-compiled GTK apps under XQuartz does. Why is this?<p>• Is it a difference of display model? Where&#x2F;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?<p>• Is it that macOS GTK apps are relying on macOS as the window manager &#x2F; 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?<p>• Something else I’m not thinking of?

It&#x27;s always worked on M1 when compiled from MacPorts... I don&#x27;t understand what has changed.

Is it related to Quartz composer?

Weird, on a 10.11 system - no mountable filesystems.<p>opens fine on 10.15 - identical md5

I wonder why they dropped support for cairo?

Does this mean it&#x27;s no longer officially supported?

But I thought X was dead? Every day or two I read about how X is dead here, on Slashdot, Twitter, on Michael Larabel&#x27;s site, everybody chanting it in unison. How could all these voices be wrong? X11 is <i>ALIVE?</i>