The GUI You Never Knew You Had: The X-Window System

While the community continues to debate KDE versus Unity versus GNOME (while proponents of other GUI environments drum their fingers), those new to Linux rarely encounter an important component that makes each of these desktops possible: the venerable X-Window System. Let’s take a look at this important piece of software in more detail.

History of X-Window System

The X-Window System was originally developed to succeed the W windowing system on UNIX which ran very slowly. X grew to be an important component of network computing environments, as one of its strenghts is support for displaying applications running across a network. Initially under the care of the MIT X Consortium (until its version 11, hence the abbreviation X11), a number of disagreements regarding licensing led to the creation of XFree86 Project, although this was ultimately folded back into the main X codebase.

What is the X-Window System

In an earlier time, even the GUI of Microsoft Windows was a “shell” that ran on top of the base (command-line) OS… how many people remember typing “win” at the “C:\” prompt? As of Windows 95, a user was sent straight to the familiar Start-menu-and-tool-bar interface, and most Linux distributions started to do the same before too long. But the fact remains that Linux desktops are also a shell that runs over the kernel and base operating system tools, the foundation of which is X-Windows

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