On Saturday June 27 2020 15:47:17 Don MacQueen wrote:

>As far as I can tell, X Windows is still the best environment for certain 
>types of work, including remote computing. I would agree that XWin users are 
>outside Apple’s concept of their customer base.

At some point Jeremy told me that Apple also care about customers like us, who 
use Macs as Unix workstations with a "just works" desktop environment. Of 
course that was back in the day where Linux didn't yet fall into that same 
category (and the Aqua/Cocoa/whatever DE still gave the kind of control I 
want). Heck, Apple may still have had their "Apple in science" pages up... *) 
So lots of water under lots of bridges.

Jeremy also told me that if ever Wayland could be made to run as it should on 
Mac, that would also address a number of XQuartz issues (because Wayland does 
provide to run unported or simply remote X11 applications, apparently). I 
haven't followed this myself, holding out as I am on OS X 10.9 but I do notice 
that the number of missing kernel features required for the basic Wayland 
libraries has been dwindling.
Advances in this area would probably have to be driving by demand from the 
communities who most need X11 (and some of which probably also have "easy" 
access to computer science students looking for interesting/useful projects ;) )

>(btw, if one wants “always there when you need it” availability of a network 
>file system, NFS with automounting is still superior to SMB and AFS, in my 
>experience)

I use the "fish:" protocol in KDE (e.g. Dolphin) for that, but do indeed fall 
back to NFS if I need to transfer larger amounts of data and cannot use rsync 
(which would be a lot faster). What AFS are you talking about here, A standing 
for Apple, or for Andrew (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAFS)? I looked into 
the latter recently because NFS does have a number of annoying issues for use 
at home where not all computers are on all the time, but got discouraged by the 
sheer amount of set-up work required so I cannot say anything good about if 
from personal experience.
But the "actively developped" bit coming from an independent foundation does 
sound reassuring in the context of "will Apple continue to support/allow XXXX".

*) Seriously, I'm a bit surprised at the brand loyalty. I've left science 
almost 10y ago now but haven't heard anything that suggests that the chronic 
dwindling funding issue has been  dealt with (except of course in "hot" topics 
like Covid research ;)). It was already hard for me to justify the "Apple Tax" 
back in the day, right now it'd be simply impossible (esp. if the software 
you're running requires X11 and so is mostly likely not locked-in to a specific 
platform).

R.
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