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Apple has made an easy to use Unix, in part by making the important decision not to use X.
by KC8ZKF 17y ago
Apple has made an easy to use Unix, in part by making the important decision not to use X.
- _pi 17y agoApple also overhauled most of the *NIX kernel and made proprietary graphical tools and closed off the supported hardware. All of which contribute to the ease of use and keep the solidity.
- rbanffy 17y agoFirst, it was not Apple's decision: it was NeXT's. NeXT chose to use Display PostScript for the NeXT OS. It had X as an option, IIRC, but, at that time, X was more suited for the Unix hard-core technical user. Not because X is hard, but because there were no user-friendly desktop simply because Unix machines were so expensive their use would be restricted to a technical elite that was more concerned with the precision of their crash simulations than with cute icons. They were happy to live with xterm and twm, as long as they had enough MIPS. At that time, the choice of DPS gave the NeXT a unique ability to provide beautifully readable fonts on a 2 bit-per-pixel screen. OSX built on that, removing the DPS for a PDF-like structure built on GhostScript (IIRC), for cost reasons. The ease of use of OSX has nothing to do with the choice not to use X.