The X Window System: The Chameleon of GUIs

In their effort to make their OSs easy to use, companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Be have tied various levels of their GUI environments together quite closely, or at least minimized the appearance of different levels from the end user's perspective. Not so with the developers of UNIX GUIs—UNIX GUIs remain clearly stratified into distinct products, which can often be mixed and matched to achieve whatever specific effect a person desires. This flexibility comes at the cost of consistency, however. Even a single desktop can display programs using half a dozen or more distinctly different user interfaces. This fact can be frustrating to many new users, but it is not too distressing when you're used to ...

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