X11 and the disturbing trend of Apple removing functionality from OS X

What I find disturbing here is the expectation that they would include it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

The X11 that Apple provided with OS X was nothing but a snapshot of whatever XQuartz version was current when that version of OS X went GM. In other words, we are now getting the exact same product, but with more timely updates. It takes a special brand of cluelessness to see that as a bad thing.

I have a X11.app in /Applications/Utilities. When launched, it shows a dialog:<p><pre><code> 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 ] </code></pre> So, I think that "and giving me this when I search their knowledge base for answers" is a bit dishonest. At least on my system, searching wasn't necessary. Apple pointed me there.

Imagine if Apple removes [the floppy drive] itself in the next version of [the Mac], or decides [wi-fi] is the future and gets rid of [the Ethernet port]?

The trend only appears disturbing if you few it from a very, very high level.<p>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.<p>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™.

"Imagine if Apple removes Terminal itself in the next version of OS X, or decides iMessage is the future and gets rid of Mail.app?"<p>I kind of lost respect for the article at this point, Mail.app, really?<p>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.

&#62; The Terminal was always limited, copy and pasting text in it was non standard, there was no default repository for ports or applications. And no matter how many cores or how much RAM I threw at it, it would beachball when copying and pasting from one terminal to another using the default app on Mac OS X.<p>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.<p>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.

This seems rather knee-jerk.<p>XQuartz <i>is</i> 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.<p>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.<p>I liken it more to the Java distribution transition as opposed to something like Messages.app obsoleting Mail.app.

Whilst Apple removing an application without informing the user is bad, them not shipping things that are less used is a good thing. RSS I'm sure had at least 10 users, but it was an unneeded overhead in two applications.<p>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.<p>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.

In the time it took to write this you could have just installed the damn thing

I'm not sure what the problem is here, especially given this is a consumer OS targeted at the masses but still its underpinnings means it can scale out to the niche when required.<p>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.<p>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.

It's worth noting that OSX <i>does</i> provide VNC support, transparently, as "Screen Sharing". AIUI this should be compatible with other desktop machines that run a VNC server and Bonjour.<p>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?

For me, OS X has increasingly become too difficult for use in development. For a while there, it was the best, especially with tools like homebrew. But, it's just become too much of a headache. Too often, I find myself wasting hours trying to get over small OSS compatibility hurdles.<p>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.

TL;DR Linkbait/Apple is evil because they removed old software.<p>The article and some of his comments show a very narrow mindset. Thinking on how evil is every corporation, just for being a corporation.<p>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<p>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 (<a href="http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5293" rel="nofollow">http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5293</a>).<p>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.<p>Years of blaming that could be solved by RTFM.

X11 never really fit in anyway. It was nearly always a special extra package to add in, and frequently lagged behind the open source effort they sponsored.<p>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.<p>In the end, we get a lower likelihood of it being installed, but a higher likelihood that it's up to date.

That is a lot of excitement for something that was available at <a href="http://xquartz.macosforge.org/" rel="nofollow">http://xquartz.macosforge.org/</a> on release day. I didn't even notice or care until I realized that libpng's headers were considered part of X11.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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"?

I guess there's nobody left at Apple who believed in the spirit of this advertisement:<p><a href="http://www4.macnn.com/macnn/articles/unixad.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www4.macnn.com/macnn/articles/unixad.jpg</a><p>Now that the Apple no longer needs to be saved by dorks, the dorks are being thrown overboard.

I had a simmilar experience with Ubuntu a few week ago, when I updated from 10.04 to 12.10. I was already using Awesome as my window manager so I wasn't exposed to most of there UI overhaul, but somewhere during the update they removed the battery indicator applet.

This is a very rational decision for Apple to make. 99% of their customers don't even know what X11 is, yet most of them will be downloading Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store. Not bundling X11 saves most users 70MB of unnecessary download.

I was just developing with headless gem [0] in a new open data project [1] (shameless plug) and I found this "issue".<p>For the record, I come from a hardcore Linux background (no Windows in my home ;)<p>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.<p>IMHO, it is not a big deal, as some already pointed.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/leonid-shevtsov/headless" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/leonid-shevtsov/headless</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/qomun/pipar" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/qomun/pipar</a>

A general desktop computer shouldn't be an iPad. I think that's the central issue here.<p>Some people just want an iOS experience - some people want to use the full depth and power of a general purpose computer.

interestingly, X11 is part of the "open sourced" part ( almost all of the UNIX underpinnings ) of OS X. Can you change what goes into the distribution CD provided by ubuntu ?

Well, it's a click away - just like java. Not much worse than having to install it from one of the non-install DVDs that came with the OS.

<a href="http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/" rel="nofollow">http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/</a>

Apple should remove Terminal.app and replace it with a stub that prompts you to install iTerm2.

I wonder if Apple risks losing its technical (i.e. programmer) users. If OS X stops feeling like a UNIX-like OS to technical users, and they move away, OS X may receive less attention from developers. And that won't be good for the platform.

One can only hope the developers inside Apple still enjoy using the terminal and "unix subsystem" in their work, enough to keep these things going into the future. I mean, xcode still needs to shell out to run gcc/llvm/clang, right?

X11? Do I need that for my Mac to get on Facebook?

Hacker News?

Stupid article. Don't read.

My question is this.. why the fuck does Apple ship Photobooth, Mail, Safari, Garageband, iMovie and iDVD with my OS and make it super bloated, when I have no bloody use for those?<p>Why can't we just go to Apple's website and install it if we want to?

How was that quote again?<p>"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away"

This is just stupid. Who copies text from one terminal to another. You are missing the entire point of the command-line and piping. This is clearly a novice who just wants easy access to X11 because he does not know how to use the command-line tools properly.<p>I manage remote FreeBSD servers with just Terminal. It is perfectly fine. And I never copy and paste text in terminal windows.