9 ms·

The extreme modular approach, while a strength in some situations is also the reason why you will never be able to build something like MacOS on any of that inf

The extreme modular approach, while a strength in some situations is also the reason why you will never be able to build something like MacOS on any of that infrastructure. It will always have little bits of jank, always have inconsistencies and although all it does is draw objects on a screen it just doesn't do it to the level of quality as in tear and flicker free that MacOS can manage.

AshamedCaptain 5y ago
Ridiculous, specially considering OS X's display server is actually rooted on Display PostScript of all things.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  is Display Postscript bad ?
  - huxley 5y ago
    For it's time it was actually pretty amazing but it hasn't been used by Apple in over 20 years.
  - wmf 5y ago
    Serializing drawing commands into text, sending them over a socket, then parsing them seems wasteful. Also I think NeXT had to pay Adobe.
- huxley 5y ago
  Display Postscript got dropped after Rhapsody/MacOS X Server 1.x. None of the 10.0+ releases of macOS used DP, instead it used Quartz2D, eventually added OpenGL to the mix, and now uses a combo of Quartz and Metal.
  - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
    And you forget the (Quartz/Display) PDF era. The point is, the window server on OS X is about an order of magnitude more historical than that of X, so the argument above is ridiculous.
    - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
      Just because it's older doesn't mean it's worse. Next had designers and a product person CEO working on it, X11 did not. End of the day one can drag windows around smoothly and resize them without flickering and have consistent drag and drop etc and the other does not.
      - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
        > Just because it's older doesn't mean it's worse. No, it doesn't. But means one cannot claim "it will always have little bits of jank, always have inconsistencies although all it does is draw objects on a screen" just because it is old, since it turns out it actually isn't. X11 does have a lot of cruft, but so does WindowServer. > End of the day one can drag windows around smoothly and resize them without flickering and have consistent drag and drop etc and the other does not. That is just a lie. I can easily make Firefox flicker on OS X while resizing and I can easily resize say Gtk+3 windows on X without flickering. And I have almost 3 4k displays...
      - pxc 5y ago
        Drag and drop isn't really a window management feature, right? It's a kind of uniform IPC for GUI apps, mostly a way to talk about files and clipboard contents (temporary files, I guess). At any rate, it has nothing to do with the display server. That said, I do agree that I would generally expect even older Apple codebases to be less crufty than stuff like Xorg. Apple rips out legacy APIs and rewrites things pretty ruthlessly on basically every macOS release.
pxc 5y ago
And yet actual window management on macOS is bizarre (wtf is with the maximization behavior, that it seems each app can decide on its own) and inflexible. Tiling, snapping, alt-drag, and shading are all missing. Automation, used to emulate those features, is cumbersome, slow, and, yes— janky. (It's way more work to customize or automate window behavior on macOS than on Plasma, for example.) Pretty much every actual window management feature on macOS aside from dragging windows by the titlebar is janky as hell. :-\ (It is neat that display server crashes/restarts on macOS don't cause you to lose your graphical session, though. Idk if any F/OSS WMs have that.)
- irae 5y ago
  The UX discussion is not directly related to the technical discussion. Apple has its own history and more than one mode is supported. Feels to me somewhat of a legacy problem. That said, their stability and flexibility is unmatched. Windows got a lot better recently, and they have a harder surface to deal with (orders of magnitude more hardware to support). But from an outsiders perspective Apple's feel like the best balance right now.
- jen20 5y ago
  > wtf is with the maximization behavior There isn't a maximise behaviour. Per the interface guidance, that button is called "zoom" [1], not maximise, and it therefore makes sense that apps do something different depending on what they need to zoom in a way that makes sense for them. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/windows-and-views/window-anatomy/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
  - wmf 5y ago
    Zoom was replaced with maximize in Lion in 2011.
    - jen20 5y ago
      Someone should probably tell the team that writes the docs then... The button now serves dual purpose as "full screen" and "zoom" (with option). It's not "maximise" though.

AshamedCaptain 5y ago

Ridiculous, specially considering OS X's display server is actually rooted on Display PostScript of all things.

agumonkey 5y ago
is Display Postscript bad ?
- huxley 5y ago
  For it's time it was actually pretty amazing but it hasn't been used by Apple in over 20 years.
- wmf 5y ago
  Serializing drawing commands into text, sending them over a socket, then parsing them seems wasteful. Also I think NeXT had to pay Adobe.
huxley 5y ago
Display Postscript got dropped after Rhapsody/MacOS X Server 1.x. None of the 10.0+ releases of macOS used DP, instead it used Quartz2D, eventually added OpenGL to the mix, and now uses a combo of Quartz and Metal.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  And you forget the (Quartz/Display) PDF era. The point is, the window server on OS X is about an order of magnitude more historical than that of X, so the argument above is ridiculous.
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    Just because it's older doesn't mean it's worse. Next had designers and a product person CEO working on it, X11 did not. End of the day one can drag windows around smoothly and resize them without flickering and have consistent drag and drop etc and the other does not.
    - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
      > Just because it's older doesn't mean it's worse. No, it doesn't. But means one cannot claim "it will always have little bits of jank, always have inconsistencies although all it does is draw objects on a screen" just because it is old, since it turns out it actually isn't. X11 does have a lot of cruft, but so does WindowServer. > End of the day one can drag windows around smoothly and resize them without flickering and have consistent drag and drop etc and the other does not. That is just a lie. I can easily make Firefox flicker on OS X while resizing and I can easily resize say Gtk+3 windows on X without flickering. And I have almost 3 4k displays...
    - pxc 5y ago
      Drag and drop isn't really a window management feature, right? It's a kind of uniform IPC for GUI apps, mostly a way to talk about files and clipboard contents (temporary files, I guess). At any rate, it has nothing to do with the display server. That said, I do agree that I would generally expect even older Apple codebases to be less crufty than stuff like Xorg. Apple rips out legacy APIs and rewrites things pretty ruthlessly on basically every macOS release.

pxc 5y ago

And yet actual window management on macOS is bizarre (wtf is with the maximization behavior, that it seems each app can decide on its own) and inflexible. Tiling, snapping, alt-drag, and shading are all missing. Automation, used to emulate those features, is cumbersome, slow, and, yes— janky. (It's way more work to customize or automate window behavior on macOS than on Plasma, for example.) Pretty much every actual window management feature on macOS aside from dragging windows by the titlebar is janky as hell. :-\ (It is neat that display server crashes/restarts on macOS don't cause you to lose your graphical session, though. Idk if any F/OSS WMs have that.)

irae 5y ago
The UX discussion is not directly related to the technical discussion. Apple has its own history and more than one mode is supported. Feels to me somewhat of a legacy problem. That said, their stability and flexibility is unmatched. Windows got a lot better recently, and they have a harder surface to deal with (orders of magnitude more hardware to support). But from an outsiders perspective Apple's feel like the best balance right now.
jen20 5y ago
> wtf is with the maximization behavior There isn't a maximise behaviour. Per the interface guidance, that button is called "zoom" [1], not maximise, and it therefore makes sense that apps do something different depending on what they need to zoom in a way that makes sense for them. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/windows-and-views/window-anatomy/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
- wmf 5y ago
  Zoom was replaced with maximize in Lion in 2011.
  - jen20 5y ago
    Someone should probably tell the team that writes the docs then... The button now serves dual purpose as "full screen" and "zoom" (with option). It's not "maximise" though.