Leopard + X11 = Danger Will Robinson!

[xela]

This is of interest to those of you who (1) use Macs, (2) use Apple's X11.app, and (3) do not follow Apple's x11-users mailing list. (Which I don't blame you for: it doesn't generally have a lot of signal; I probably only read one message in twenty.)

This weekend has seen more traffic on the list than the entire rest of October. All of it complaining about various bugs with the new x.org-based x11.app on Leopard, including a couple of show-stoppers:

• option-click no longer sends middle-click; nor does any other key-combination anyone has found (though 3-button mice are reported to still DTRT)
• "Spaces is a total basket case with X11".

Apple's lead X developer has been active on the list all weekend, so they're paying attention. But I'm certainly not going to be switching to Leopard any time soon.

Comments

[kareila]

I don't think I've used X11 since 10.2 or possibly earlier. At some point I just decided Terminal and BBEdit were good enough to replace xterm and emacs, which I think is all that alierak uses it for.

How much of you continuing to use X11 is habit and how much is needing to do things you can't do with native apps? (And of the latter, how much of that is Zephyr windows?)

[nakor.livejournal.com]

Emacs has a very nice non-X11 "Emacs.app" port nowadays. I've been happy using it for over a year.

[alierak.livejournal.com]

No, I've also recently used it as a remote display for some (nonportable java) GUI admin apps at work.

[alierak.livejournal.com]

I would also say that I use X11 for the windowmanager choices -- I don't think I'd be able to completely do without mouseover-focus, ability to interact with background windows, minimal window decoration, and preconfigured window sizes / locations.

Also, before upgrading to 10.4, I was using X11 to help jwz fix bugs in xscreensaver. He was in the middle of porting it to MacOS X, which meant introducing a lot of new bugs and uncovering a lot of old ones. His port wouldn't run as a native screensaver on anything less than 10.4, so I worked on it as a set of X11 programs instead.