The X-Windows Disaster (1994)
At the time when X was first being developed, there simply were no open source alternatives.  I used a few of the closed source ones and they were nice enough, but generally available on only a single platform (e.g., HP), which made them fairly useless.<p>Even <i>if</i> Wayland succeeds, it&#x27;ll be a long time before it has truly replaced X.  In reality, I think it&#x27;s more likely that both will be (or already have been) been run over by web apps.