It truly boggles the mind that anybody could have thought X11 would ever be a sensible solution for desktop graphics. If they'd done the sensible thing and developed an alternative when Linux was still in alpha, they could've saved a lot of people a ton of headache over the years, drastically improved performance on lower-end hardware, and had all the pain of transitioning over with by now; instead, they put it off until they simply could not put it off any longer (now that both of their eeevil closed-source competitors have made spiffing up the OS with GPU magic a selling point and they're still stuck with client software talking to an imaginary server over a network link where both ends are on the same damn machine,) drove off legions of potential converts over the years with endless configuration headaches and shoddy video performance, wound up with at least half a dozen mutually incompatible and differently-behaving toolkits to put a modern user interface on what amounts to a software emulation of a glorified vector terminal, and ended up having to come up with an alternative anyway, all for the sake of sticking with a design that was crufty when it was new back in 1984.
If that isn't the Linux philosophy in a nutshell, I don't know what is.
