Macintosh Technical Stuff

This shot shows Mac OS X 10.2 running Quartz and its default Aqua desktop. An X server (Apple X11) is also running, allowing Quartz to display windows that belong to X11-based applications running on OS X and elsewhere. Shown here are the Gnome terminal, the KDE terminal (both installed via Fink), an xterm, and the standard Mac OS X terminal application. Gimp is also running, since the screenshot had to be exported to PNG from PDF.

And here we have the same Mac OS X running the Gnome 2 desktop environment. Note that standard Macintosh programs and Cocoa programs (like the Mac OS X terminal application shown above) cannot be displayed in this environment (a keyboard shortcut switches between the X and Quartz desktops). Again, we have the Gnome terminal, the KDE terminal, and an xterm (but no OS X terminal).

Is this KDE 3? Anyway, this is my trusty Mac OS X box running KDE. As with Gnome (and any other X11-based desktop environment or window manager) Macintosh and Cocoa programs cannot be displayed. So we are limited to only three terminal applications, the Gnome terminal, the KDE terminal, and good old xterm. Gimp is also running because it took the screenshots.

Note that XFree86 can also be started instead of Quartz rather than alongside Quartz. If this is done (and I don't recommend it), Mac OS X will behave like any other Unix-like OS and be "limited" to such programs that run in text mode or use X11. This is in fact how Darwin/x86 (the rudimentary release of Mac OS X for IBM compatible PCs) works.