owl VS XQuartz

Well, there is a Wayland Compositor for macOS:

https://github.com/owl-compositor/owl

It still lacks a lot of features though (I think, I never tried it out)

> X runs on so many more platforms than Wayland [...] Python3 is strictly an improvement on every platform, I don't think they're analogous because there really is no good reason to keep Python2 around

X runs on more platforms than Wayland because...it was ported to them. Just like things use Python 3 because they were ported to it.

This is also understating the reach of X I think: it's widely used in the embedded world, is seeing increasing support in BSDs, and has even been used on macOS (https://github.com/owl-compositor/owl). People have even used it to embed an entire compositor inside a GTK app (https://github.com/alexlarsson/wakefield).

That isn't to say that libwayland has a lot of Linux-isms in it, but afaik they're not really structural as much as there is lack of interest to generalize things more. Heck, the protocol-oriented architecture would even make it easier for anything Linux-esque to be removed in favor of alternative protocols.

Yup, the Owl compositor implements Wayland on Quartz (the macOS graphics system).

Thanks! FYI there is a wayland compositor for macos too, so it would be nice to be able to use that with linux apps in a VM...

brew install --cask xquartz

Or install from the project homepage [1]. Then just launch the X11 app. Note that it does require the application to be built for Mac - it’s not an emulator, just an implementation of the X11 APIs.

[1] https://www.xquartz.org/

I’ve recently spent some time working with terminal emulators in raw mode on macOS. While I chose to handle key events using escape codes, and found it seriously difficult (even gave up) to process the shift modifier key. However, I came across xquartz [1], which seems to do similar things as mentioned in the article. Would detecting shift key state have been trivial using such a library?

[1] https://github.com/XQuartz/XQuartz

The contents are rendered through gtk/cairo which not only goes through https://www.xquartz.org/ but also doesn't use GPU rendering (it was experimental 3 years ago, maybe better now). The main issue seems to be that neither Inkscape nor gtk people have much low level Darwin experts or time available to invest in debugging the whole rendering stack. See for example https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/1614 and all the other referenced issues for all the gory details.

I live in a mezzanine studio using a M1 macbook for a workstation (writing/editing) and my old laptop with openbsd as a local server. I play music from that obsd server upstairs, which thus fills the whole room down to my desktop through the plugged-in speakers. My hosted library plays fine with mpd and ncmpcpp, and I just figured out it's not so difficult to use mpv to play streamed youtube videos, since firefox in XQuartz streaming from xenocara is way too slow anyhow.

There is an alternative: I ended up using Xquartz to give me an X11 environment and then running StumpWM as my tiling window manager. I used this for all my productive stuff, running full screen in MacOS, then a quick keypress got me back to the Mac environment.

I also used Xquartz. Emacs was better for me though because capturing text output and documenting what I captured was so much easier than X-window.

Link

I used a Mac for router software testing for over 20 years. I ran a shell on my mac either through Emacs (on occasion) or X-quartz with terminal connections to a dozen or more routers, linux and or Windows systems. In all that time, I opened the terminal on my mac maybe 5 times.