[bradleyland]

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™.

[leephillips]

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.

[bradleyland]

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.

[w0utert]

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.

[keithpeter]

Did all the config go as well? The dotfiles? Did the author try installing the recommended X11 over the top to see if the old configs were picked up?

[bradleyland]

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.

[keithpeter]

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)

Good luck