I remember using XFree86 in the late 90s and first ~3 years of the 2000s. When the X server started changing a lot circa 2003 it was really exciting, and I very

I remember using XFree86 in the late 90s and first ~3 years of the 2000s. When the X server started changing a lot circa 2003 it was really exciting, and I very eagerly anticipated those releases. I think Xorg is better than XFree86. Some of the things they did off the top of my head: * Render extension. This enabled all sorts of things, like easier drawing and scaling of pixmaps, or better font handling. * Less monolithic build, phase out imake. This allowed iterating various components at different rates. * Better auto configuration - less need to write a config file for the most common configurations. XCB was also a good idea. I don't think it lived up to full potential because interest in writing code for X waned. I think one thing that was lost to history are some of the proprietary X servers, such as those by Sun and SGI. The XFree86/Xorg lineage is missing their input.