What I find disturbing here is the expectation that they would include it.
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.
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.
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 first time I tried to open Gimp after upgrading to Mountain Lion, OS X popped up a prompt telling me that X11 was now provided by the XQuartz project, and it had a link to go download it.
Barely different from trying to run Java software and getting the "You need Java, click here to install it" dialog box.
Apple may not be releasing X11 any more, but they made sure the experience was relatively simple. And give the number of people who actually use X11 (as a percentage of Mac users) it seems like a pretty fair decision.
Same thing happened to me. I looked for XQuartz after the ML upgrade on my hard drive and found that it had not been uninstalled. So I ran Gimp and it requested XQuartz be installed and opened the download page. I downloaded and installed it, then I attempted to open Gimp again. The program then requested the ___location of XQuartz and I identified it under Utilities and Gimp started running.
Go ahead and open a bug report. I don't that this is expected behavior.
only developers and system admins would want it installed
False. While I do make software and know how to handle situations like this, my other work is making light shows for concerts. I sometimes make use of a PC-based controller (Chamsys MagicQ PC) and recently had to borrow a Macbook to run it when I left my Thinkpad's power supply at a venue. The Mac version seems to be a port of the Linux version, itself a desktop port of the embedded software that runs their lighting consoles. It uses X11.
The experience of running it on a Mac was more or less like any other Mac software - it just had a longer startup time. Now, either the developers will have to modify it, or users will have a complicated series of steps to follow to get the software.
Sure, it's still an edge case, but Apple made the UX worse for some users here without making it better for others. That seems like a bad trade.
Sure, it's still an edge case, but Apple made the UX worse for some users here without making it better for others. That seems like a bad trade.
False. Seriously, you are blaming Apple because of program for which "The Mac version seems to be a port of the Linux version, itself a desktop port of the embedded software that runs their lighting consoles" which runs on X11?
There are genuine uses cases for X11, but users who can't figure out how to install it are at the very beginning of a gauntlet of pain. That Apple is not ushering them into the gauntlet seems, at best, neutral.
1. Get alert from OS that you need X11 to run this app.
2. Click link to get XQuartz
3. Install XQuartz
It's a one-time difficulty install that basically amounts to the same thing as a user installing Flash or Java on their computer. Just because some amount of users need something doesn't mean that Apple has to provide it.
My understanding (and please correct me if I'm wrong) is that an 'upgrade' is really a fresh installation, with your user data migrated across afterwards. In that context it's not really a 'removal' as such -- and it's hard to see how else they'd do it.
I'm actually glad they made this change. In the past, XQuartz was sometimes ahead of the officially distributed version, which could be messy. Now they're the same thing.
Except that XQuartz in the past installed itself to various system paths on Mac OS X. When you "upgrade" the OS the installer moves everything installed out of the way and basically does a clean install of the OS. At the end it copies over everything in paths that it doesn't control (mainly /Users, /usr/local, (/usr/<everything else> gets wiped), /Applications, /opt and others). Anything that is core to the OS will basically be in a clean install state.
For example, I've written some custom device drives for OS X that were installed in the system path (being kexts and all), those were removed. They weren't specifically compatible with OS X Mountain Lion, so it makes sense.
> What I find disturbing here is the expectation that they would include it.
If it's always been included in the past, why wouldn't it be included now?
Maybe it's just me, but when I buy an "upgrade", I expect it to be a better version of what I already have.
Also, the installer didn't just not include X11, it actively removed the version he had installed. If the current install isn't compatible with Mountain Lion they could have popped up a message box or prompted him to upgrade the next time he ran an X app. There's no reason to delete things from his machine without telling him.
Except that the old version came with the old OS... also XQuartz installs itself as part of the system so that you don't run into issues using an older version of XQuartz when you upgrade your OS. I just re-ran GIMP, and it prompted me to go download X11. Downloaded, installed, and now everything works as expected.
I really don't see an issue with this. It is not like it is completely removed (XQuartz BTW is completely open source, so if Apple stopped developing it someone else could pick it up).
> Also, the installer didn't just not include X11, it actively removed the version he had installed. If the current install isn't compatible with Mountain Lion they could have popped up a message box or prompted him to upgrade the next time he ran an X app. There's no reason to delete things from his machine without telling him.
Instead it removed the software, and on first run it told him he would need to download XQuartz which is available freely ... The old software is not compatible, leaving it in place could have caused issues. I don't see why the solution Apple used is so wrong, they clearly did present a popup and didn't just let it fail without errors.
There are a number of changes in the last two releases of OS X that concern me.
But removing Java and X11 from the base install doesn't bother me as long as they remain easy enough to obtain afterwards for those of us that need them.
> It's not essential for 99.9% of Mac users and only developers and system admins would want it installed.
It is worth pointing out that X11.app is necessary for window management apps like Cinch[1] and Divvy[2]. The former simply reproduces Windows 7's "dragging to the edges to split/maximize" behavior. This is hardly deeply technical stuff. Both apps are available on the Mac App Store - but users need to jump through a painful DMG installation hoop to get their purchases to run.
The expectation in the article was not that apple would include X11 in the OS, but rather that an in-place update to the new version of the OS would not remove X11
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.
It's a good thing. X11 has joined Flash and Java in the ranks of "stuff third parties maintain".
RSS removal is a different animal. Statistically speaking, no one used it (except you and me of course) but 10 minutes of app shopping and I've got a better solution running. Much better.
I have a X11.app in /Applications/Utilities. When launched, it shows a dialog:
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 ]
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]?
I actually found the removal of the floppy drive to be rather premature. It took several years for any of the currently popular alternatives to reach critical mass for most people. It wasn't reasonable to assume, for example that Internet access would be available on a computer you wanted to bring a file to. USB flash drives weren't available (or at least cheap and common), and it was more likely than not that a destination computer wouldn't be able to read one.
I knew a lot of people with Macs in the late '90s, and most of them bought USB floppy drives.
If they hadn't kickstarted the process, how long would it have taken for the removal not to be premature? Often these things have to be done before their time in order for their time to come at all.
X11, Flash, and Java were all potential attack vectors whose security is provided for by a third party -- I can see why Apple would want to discourage this.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Apple's Radar bug tracker had a few dozen bugs in Safari RSS, maybe even a potential DOS threat, and they chose to move on rather than allocating more resources to an unpopular feature.
More generally, saving space, allowing you to add different things inside a laptop. I realise you could argue the same for hard disk space, but it's not anywhere near as limited.
I had one of the first machine where they dropped the floppy. There were 2 or 3 times that it was a real pain, and the rest of the time, it just didn't matter.
Eventually, I went back to a machine with a floppy, but I wound up using zip drives instead, since the floppies were so damn small (capacity).
(BTW, that's the Powerbook 100 and 5300 I'm referring to above, but I did have a duo 230 and 2300 around that time too.)
Cherry pick? Apple has a long history of removing what most users don't use. RS-232, Centronix ("printer"), FireWire, VGA, Ethernet, and various other ports have all been dropped over time. Floppy (both 5.25" & 3.5"), CD, DVD, and probably other media (escaping me) support gone. Blu-ray in effect dropped before even included. Likewise, various software support has been eradicated over time as use dwindled to more-hassle-than-it's-worth status. When dropped, everything still was available those needing it, provided by easy/cheap add-ons & installs. Users do well to wean off HyperCard, X11, and other things which cling to a double-digit past.
Contrast that with the Dell box on my desk right now, which still has every physical port mentioned above, plus 2 PS/2 (!!!) plugs, an eSATA port, and an I-don't-know-what; the software running thereon (Windows) will _still_ run darned near everything I've accumulated over the last 30 years. ..._WHY_ do I want to run darned near everything I've accumulated over the last 30 years?
No wonder this two-cubic-foot boat anchor has a Geekbench score lower than a barely-there MacBook Air.
It's Apple proactively removing things from one of their products. They decided that XScreensaver was not something they wanted to allow and invented reasons to not allow it. Until they changed their minds.
The conversation was about Apple removing built-in hardware from their computers when making new models, not about Apple blocking third-party software.
The trend only appears disturbing if you few it from a very, very high level.
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.
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™.
That's a good argument for Apple not including their own version of x11. But the author was most anguished that they removed an installation of x11 that he was depending on.
Speaking of anguish, simply leaving a non-supported version of X11 installed on future releases of the OS wouldn't be a terribly good idea either. X is a pretty big dependency. If the entire Mac user body moves to XQuartz, it's best for that to happen quickly.
Apple has a well established history of quickly (some might say ruthlessly) depreciating and moving OS components and APIs forward. The upside of this is that developers don't have to experience the anguish associated with supporting several versions of sub-system for long. OS upgrades for the Mac are cheap and easy, so users tend to run closer to the front line. This is especially true for developers.
The downside is that you're frequently caught off guard. The change from Apple X11 to XQuartz is, definitively, a yak shaving exercise. Bleh.
The approach isn't without trade-offs. In other words, I try not to don my rose colored glasses prematurely, but I've spent enough time on all the major platforms to recognize that there are many advantages to the approach Apple uses here.
Only the very latest XQuartz version actually works on Mountain Lion, so if the guy was still relying on an old, Apple-supported version, his current X11 installation would not have worked anyway.
My experience: My current OS install dates back to Leopard, which was installed on my MacBook Pro back when I purchased it in 2009. I've upgraded to each subsequent OS X release since then, and maintained a development environment utilizing X11 (for gnuplot) the entire time.
It is my understanding that the X11 included with OS X was actually a snapshot of XQuartz at the time of OS release, so the config data is in line with what XQuartz expects. In the Unixy bits, OS X upgrades are a lot like other Unix-like operating systems in that package operations remove the application, but not the configuration.
After installing XQuartz, gnuplot continues to run just like it did under previous versions of OS X. I simply ran the XQuartz installer and got back to work.
Yup, just like Ubuntu. Gnuplot does not depend heavily on whatever window manager you are using's config anyway, it just needs the X server (similar to R stats)
"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?"
I kind of lost respect for the article at this point, Mail.app, really?
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.
While that seems unlikely , there is definitely a strong constituent of people who would applaud it as a "bold and forward thinking move", "lol, who uses email anymore?"
> 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.
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.
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.
XQuartz is 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> RSS I'm sure had at least 10 users, but it was an unneeded overhead in two applications.
Exactly this is my issue (not the rest of your comment, but this sentiment which I see everywhere since a couple years or so). Every time Apple drops support for anything, people talk about cleaning up, or the inevitable march of progress, or about how Microsoft is doomed because you can still install their OS on unworthy 32-bit boxen.
RSS support in mail hardly imposed any overhead on users. Why do we care about what Apple's programmers think or feel? These folks are paid to keep their apps running. Maintaining Cocoa apps is something that Apple can easily hire more people for (unlike hacking on the kernel, or on system frameworks).
It probably doesn't impose any overhead specifically on users, but it's additional codebase that needs to be maintained and whilst that's a 'well that sucks for the devs' issue it becomes a user issue as they're not focusing on their core competencies, which in this case is making the email client as good as possible. I'll take a better email app over additional, underused features.
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.
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.
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 does provide VNC support, transparently, as "Screen Sharing". AIUI this should be compatible with other desktop machines that run a VNC server and Bonjour.
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?
X11 has little to with screen sharing. They always describe it as the networked window server, but in reality on OSX, it is the software that allows Inkscape and similar programs to run on your own machine.
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.
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.
I'm curious, what do you have problems with? For me it's been smooth sailing since around 10.5 or so - and the only OSS problems were with projects which assumed everyone would use Linux with a certain version of GCC & autotools.
Their reorganization of XCode into an app bundle was really, really annoying and, frankly, makes zero sense; making the command line tools an extra download makes me suspicious that the developers they care about are Mac/iOS developers (as opposed to general purpose ones).
"makes me suspicious that the developers they care about are Mac/iOS developers"
No surprise here. It is very clear that the Mac is becoming two things:
1. Just a bigger iPad that isn't too awkward to use where your average consumer can actually create stuff (videos, photos, etc.);
2. A development machine to create iOS apps.
Sigh; I might have to switch back to FreeBSD for development. The only things tying my into my mac right now are tax software and word processing. Word processing I can just convert to TeX, but the tax software is an annoyance.
So, UNIX development is still there, but I'm worried that in the future I'll need to pay a developer license to run unsigned code (or something equally ludicrous). The interfaces are going down the tube - look at Notes, or iCal. If iOS keeps influencing OSX, we'll see tape reels and bookshelves in XCode.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but Windows 8's Metro actually looks better designed than modern Apple software.
> the only OSS problems were with projects which assumed everyone would use Linux with a certain version of GCC & autotools
Projects that assume OS X are even worse. Homebrew, for example, hardcodes gcc as gcc-4.2. I tried working with gcc-4.7 (which is ridiculously easy to install using homebrew), but so many build recipes broke, that I had to just give up and reset to apple-gcc-4.2.
Oh, sure - I just find it really annoying when upstream developers hard-code irrelevant details or use something like autoconf poorly and then the distribution gets blamed for not remaining in stasis.
Yesterday, it was 'pip install matplotlib' (through virtualenvwrapper). Just a few days earlier, it was getting a dev version of paramiko to work with ansible.
Most likely, both were user errors of some sort, but instead of spending a few hours trying to wade through homebrew recipes, I just decided to boot up ubuntu.
I could and have. But, the performance of VirtualBox on my 2011 Lion-based MBP seems much worse than on my windows box (with comparable hardware). I have a task on my todo list to investigate.
TL;DR Linkbait/Apple is evil because they removed old software.
The article and some of his comments show a very narrow mindset. Thinking on how evil is every corporation, just for being a corporation.
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
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 (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5293).
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.
> TL;DR Linkbait/Apple is evil because they removed old software.
The article and some of his comments show a very narrow mindset. Thinking on how evil is every corporation, just for being a corporation.
What is the value in giving a synopsis like this which is completely wrong? The author discusses his feelings a couple of times in the article, impugns Apple's motives not once, doesn't discuss corporatism, and uses the word "bad" precisely once to describe his experience here. He's not hyperbolic enough to use the word "evil," that was you.
Users who depend on both X11 and Apple's RSS support (all ten of them) are going to find this upgrade a bit of a pain. That's not reflective of a narrow mindset, it's reflective of an unusual use case.
The thing is, nobody is forcing them to upgrade. Except for the RSS thing that was a dubious way to handle it (maybe being more clear on ways to get out a OPML file).
Apple did inform, maybe in a way too opaque. But they did inform it.
On the topic of corporations. I may not interpret it as americans have the "corporations" rhetoric. But the feeling I have as a whole, from the author (Anthony and comments) was very paranoid.
Even calling the backend of OSX has "The Terminal" was very narrow on his scope to explain the problem of this trend and what we loose.
From where I see it, let XQuartz (partially supported/founded by Apple), Google (as seen on iOS6 Youtube.app removal), do it outside the OSX/iOS release schedule, even Apple did it for the iBooks apps and Podcast app.
Having old software stalling progress is just bad for all.
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.
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.
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 http://xquartz.macosforge.org/ on release day. I didn't even notice or care until I realized that libpng's headers were considered part of X11.
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.
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.
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"?
That ad is from 2002. X11 didn't ship with Mac OS X until 2003. Either they never believed in the spirit of that advertisement and the whole thing was a sham, or built-in X11 support isn't actually necessary for it.
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.
It's been some time since Apple shipped the X11 package by default. You've had to download it yourself. They're not saving anything by removing it from people's computers
I was just developing with headless gem [0] in a new open data project [1] (shameless plug) and I found this "issue".
For the record, I come from a hardcore Linux background (no Windows in my home ;)
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.
IMHO, it is not a big deal, as some already pointed.
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 ?
Jobs was in charge of Apple as they shipped numerous versions of Terminal.app for a period of over 10 years. If he was going to remove it, he would have.
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.
The whole point of this move is so that technical users will get a fully up-to-date version of X11, rather than whatever old version was up-to-date when the OS went gold master. Technical users will have little trouble installing it (Apple makes it easy), and will appreciate being up to date. Meanwhile my parents won't miss it.
Another example of this way of thinking is that Apple apparently removed the web server software from Mountain Lion as well. As someone who builds LAMP sites for a living, this is fine with me because the Apple versions of AMP were always out of date or had some quirks. Everyone I know who develops for LAMP on Mac OS X runs MAMP or Virtual Box, not the software that ships with OS X.
Ah, fair enough. I'm not an OS X user, but I have heard about Apple's tendency to have out of date open-source (and therefore often insecure or buggy) libraries and software.
As long as it's possible to install the technical apps, I don't really care whether they ship with the system. I don't imagine many technical users would care, although I could be wrong. You never got a compiler with Mac OS X without downloading and installing one separately, and many other tools people like to use have to be downloaded separately too.
Also until very recently, users bought the OS on DVD and installed it on gigantic hard disks.
Now, Apple optimizes for distribution over the Internet and installation on SSDs. That is also why Mac OS X no longer ships with that printer driver DVD.
True, forgot about that, since it was almost always out of date and not worth using. In any case, it didn't get installed by default, so I think the point still stands.
Apple went to great lengths to get OS X validated as a full-on UNIX. To what degree do developers in general confuse UNIX itself with good-riddance mis-associations therewith which cause unnecessary friction against modern development? (Can we drop vi already? fine paradigm unto itself, but counter to any other 21st-century UI...)
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?
I'm not sure that it does. In fact the Mountain Lion upgrade deleted the command line toolchain from my machine. I had to go into Xcode and manually tell it to re-download the "Command Line Tools" optional extension.
That's just the stuff that goes in /usr/bin, right? Aren't the files always present in /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin etc.?
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?
Why can't we just go to Apple's website and install it if we want to?
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.
I manage remote FreeBSD servers with just Terminal. It is perfectly fine. And I never copy and paste text in terminal windows.
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.
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.
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.