Rick,
The X window system is absolutely fantastic, and long live the Athena project.

In the 90s, I was confound to a VAX in college when Linux was starting up and
I was running it on my 486 duct-taped box with kernel 1.1. At the time it was
the XFree86 that had a liberal enough license for Patrick to include in his
Slackware distribution. Xorg came about later and he switched. That is the first
time I realized what a fantastic API Xlib was for making applications. I was
popping X windows on my 486 over the 24.400 baud modem. I had also pushed a
Netscape window over the modem on the Amiga X server... Doing things becasue
we could but great lessons.

With that preface, let me take the opportunity to say I am trying to do my part
to boost development of X-window based applications (and more so 3D based apps).
I am in the process of slowly releasing open source code aimed at the Unix
programmer. Slowly I want to push Windows-centric libraries for transparent
porting across systems. (Maybe in the end we all develop for Windows and rely
o CodeWeavers to run it for us under everything else.) This sounds like a lot
of talk and no substance, so here is the link to my recent releases:

https://github.com/nompelis/INXLib

I tried to make a "library" of using the Xlib without a steep learning curve
and also providing an example of how to use Xlib and how it works. As for my
library, here is the first demo built on top of it:

https://github.com/nompelis/INXLib/tree/master/demo1

I am in the process of authoring a set of 3D widgets, so that I can make a
3D desktop accessible to virtual reality applications. Again, I am starting
with X11 but I promise to deliver a cross-platform library (if you know what
SDL has been for the last 10 years you get the idea).

All comments and criticism welcome. Happy hacking.