“After quitting work on Xgl I received a lot of email and read a
lot of posts. My conclusion is that most people don’t really know
what is going on with graphics in Linux. It’s understandable that
people don’t see the whole picture. Graphics is a large and complex
area with many software components and competing developer groups.
I’ve written this as an attempt to explain how all of the parts fit
together.“This year is the X server’s twenty-first birthday. Started in
1984 out of Project Athena it has served the Unix community well
over the years. X is in widespread use and powers most Linux
desktops today. The Wikipedia article provides much more detail but
two major X innovations are being open source, which enabled cross
platform support, and network transparency…”