Comment by commandlinefan

When I first saw X, I had already grown up with PCs, so the whole concept of running the “main program” on another computer just to display it on my computer seemed so illogical I thought I must just be misunderstanding it. I mean.. I have a computer right here, why not run the program on this computer…? However, if you think about it - the X philosophy was actually mostly correct (or at least more useful than it initially seemed), they just did it in a clunky way. We’ve been slowly migrating to web applications which are the same basic concept: the program runs on the web server and your browser displays the results. This actually is better from a security standpoint (the server can access data that isn’t distributed to the client) and a maintenance standpoint (I can deploy a new version to the server and it’s instantaneously available to all clients). Running a “program” remotely and displaying the results locally is so ubiquitous now that my teenage kids are confused by the entire concept of desktop applications. What I’d love to see, and wish I had the free time to implement, is a Linux UI based on something like SVGALib that doesn’t use X at all; just enough to run a terminal and a browser (and maybe an email client and a word processor if somebody wanted to write one).