At 06:35 AM 12/11/01 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
Dude, there are HUNDREDS of alternate GUI front-ends (the vast majority are not compatible with X (aka MIT's Athens - there's your clue as to its popularity). Unfortunately they don't get the technical backing to get a significant 'bootstrap' percentage in the market up front. In other words, when X got started back in the 80's there were no other GUI's that were nearly that advanced. So people used it. By the time the market expanded the number of alternative GUI's had a much harder time to get into the market.
MIT's project *Athena* developed X because they had an equal mix of DEC and [I forget -IBM?] workstations and so developed a device independent display server. That it was subject to code bloat is regrettable but its use is not mandatory.