@landley @khleedril @lonjil @hko Yup. X11 dates to the era of thin clients with bitmapped displays connected by ethernet because hard disks and CPUs were comparatively expensive. We turned the corner around 1993-96 when the price of RAM and hard disks dropped enough to make a single-user PC with an SVGA or better display running UNIX/X11 cheaper than X terminal plus a slice of a Sun or VAX server to drive it.