It became clear some time ago (10 years?) that Apple had abandonded the scientific and technical markets. They (first) shifted their focus to what I would call the teeny-bopper market — you know — people who go around waving their arrms in the air as they danced crazily with earbuds in their ears, composing beautifully formatted html emails with lots of photos in them to all their social media friends, and to whom having just the right playlist is oh, so, essential. (hopefully I’m not insulting anyone here!) And (later) as someone here mentioned, to making MacOS look like iOS. For evidence, look no further than the discontiunation of iWeb and Aperture, the spinning off of X Windows support, the disapperance of science and technology from their website, the burying of the interface for mounting NFS exports, and so on. (Even some of their iOS apps have shifted in downward directions as part ot fhis shift.)
I had a Mac on my desk at work for something like 31 years (until my recent retirement), starting with the Mac SE ~1987. I was never so happy as when OS X came out and I could drop down to one computer on my desk, since OS X played nice in the Linux world (though for me it was Solaris at that time). X Win support was essential to my computing environment, especially for doing real work on remote computers. Neither Mac OS nor Windows options for remote computing have ever been as good as X Win, in my experience and opinion. Even something as simple focus-follows-mouse makes a big difference to me. Were I still working, my fallback position would be a Linux box on my desk with Windows running in a VM. Because, outside my technical work, almost everything I did on a computer could be done with MS Office, and for Office, it hardly matters which OS one uses. I think it’s fair to say that without the efforts of the open source community, a Mac would not have stayed on my desk for all those years. Don MacQueen m...@comcast.net > On Jan 5, 2020, at 12:24 PM, René J.V. Bertin via X11-users > <x11-users@lists.apple.com> wrote: > > On Sunday January 05 2020 11:17:16 Christopher Bort wrote: > >> many years. I have a linux VM in VirtualBox that works quite >> nicely for running any X11 apps I need or want. It may be a >> 'heavyweight' solution, but one of the reasons I did it >> originally was to see if I could comfortably do all of my day to >> day computing tasks under linux. It turns out that I can and I >> actually spend a fair amount of time in the linux VM. I have a > > I have done this too, years ago now, to see how a properly upgradable Linux > distro would do as a desktop OS (my main workhorse in the late 90s was a > Linux rig without a DE environment at all). If memory serves me well I > discovered on that VM that the KDE4 environment was actually very similar to > the earlier OS X versions (up till 10.4 probably), so I quickly replaced the > VM with the cheapest netbook that could run 8Gb. I've since replaced that > one, but these have been my beater machines, and I still use the KDe4/Plasma4 > DE (but with lots of self-built KF5 apps). Sadly the Plasma5 DE seems to be > aligning with the examples set by Apple and Microsoft (but still without > instilling the idea you're trespassing on your own computer). > > My Mac is a MBP 8.1 (early 2011 13" with 2.7Ghz i7) which is still plenty > fast for most of what I do nowadays, it now has 16Gb (bought with 4), a 1Tb > SSHD, Thunderbolt dock so a few USB3 ports, a nice 22" external screen and > runs 10.9.5 because even now I don't really feel an urge to upgrade (partly > because I managed to get Qt 5.9.8 to build there, *with* the X11 backend if > you please :)). Me too I don't plan on replacing it with another Mac, not > with a new one at least. Too bad for that expensive Thunderbolt dock... > > In fact, since we adopted a puppy in september I'm spending most of my time > downstairs, working on the Linux system instead of on the Mac... > > R. > _______________________________________________ > Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. > X11-users mailing list (X11-users@lists.apple.com) > Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: > https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/x11-users/macq%40comcast.net > > This email sent to m...@comcast.net _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. X11-users mailing list (X11-users@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/x11-users/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
