X and NeWS history

The comment about how X is really just a distributed database system with occasional visual side effects that could be reduced down to 10 or so API calls gives us a glimpse as to what life could have been.

It's a shame that all of the X replacements on the horizon also ditch the network transparency part, even though that's been a killer feature for me. I hate how much of a hack Remote Desktop is on Windows machines.

I prefer every other OSes remote desktop, because I can detach and reattach them in different computers.

Rightly or wrongly, modern GUIs tend to be sufficiently graphical that X turns into effectively sending bitmaps anyway, so in my experience a lightly compressed VNC is more responsive.

It is nice that in X individual windows can live independently, but adding that to your windowing manager feels like less work, and is how for example windows works nowadays (don't know other windowing systems well enough).