> X Window has a good design? Only because it allowed competing tool kits on top of it ("Provide mechanism rather than policy. In particular, place user interfa

> X Window has a good design? Only because it allowed competing tool kits on top of it ("Provide mechanism rather than policy. In particular, place user interface policy in the clients' hands.") Yes only this simple thing made a much better design. It can be used to provide a modern and beautiful desktop environment even 35 years after its creation. > Besides the fact that the X libs are almost universally reviled and nobody used them as soon as they could (Motif, Qt, Gtk, etc.). You are not supposed to use Xlibs directly to program user interface. They just provide the primitive APIs to create windows, process events and draw on the screen. It is normal to use a toolkit like Qt that use Xlib as a backend. I agree that programming Xlib directly is not very sexy but it sort of make sense and is yet better than Win32 programming. > The core concept, that of network part is actively being abandoned right now, see the Wayland efforts. The fact that this is a good choice is still to be demonstrated. > Win32 is also horrible, but you can kind of get why it was that way: the hardware was abysmal when it was conceived and backwards compatibility was super, super important in the early and cutthroat desktop market. Yes, you can excuse them for creating Win32 at the time but they have no excuse for not providing qnything better after 30 years. Oh yes, you can create beautiful UI if you only use Visual Studio, you get use to all the warts and limitations, if you forget cross-platform, it will works only on windows, if you use visual studio installer and ship all the zillions of DLLs that you may need with the most baroque distribution system. On windows I am still looking for a decent way of programming UIs without embracing all the MS bullshit.