Eh, that’s a nice fluff piece but doesn’t match my understanding or experiences working with X. Once X had more widespread adoption in the 1990s you started to

Eh, that’s a nice fluff piece but doesn’t match my understanding or experiences working with X. Once X had more widespread adoption in the 1990s you started to see a lot more hate. The layers of abstraction are there because X is such a godawful piece of shit. Sure, your application will be fast if you only use XCB or Xlib (and XCB is just a modern replacement for Xlib, made because of how deeply flawed Xlib is, and it can’t even fully replace Xlib). But few people are willing to put in the blood, sweat, and code to write something that is pure X. So if X worked great for what it was aiming to do, it was aiming to do the wrong thing.