I never met anyone who actually physically had a PDP11. At Minnesota State in
the 90s we emulated it (what a concept!) Hey, at least you still have hair!

> 
> Personally, I'm disappointed the Direct Framebuffer guys seemed to give 
> up. I don't want another desktop, X and KDE are already spectacular. I 
> want real time hardware access, not "requests" and "hints."
>

It is still there (in Linux). Back in the day (circa 2002) I had to jump
through a lot of hoops to get OpenGL hardware accelerated stuff to work on X
running over a Voodoo 3Dfx card. Back then, 3D accelerated graphics in X was
just giving a "viewport" to the native 3Dfx drivers. So it was the same type
of calls made to the graphics hardware if you were on X or a tty (console) on
the machine. If it went bad... I had to log in from another computer and simply
restart the system. No. You want the X server to do whatever possible to
talk to the hardware on your behalf. It has worked really well for over a
decade now. You can get incredible framerates too. I assure you that you want
constants sent to the hardware. That is how SGI designed OpenGL over X at the
infancy of OpenGL.

has anyone tried doing 3D accelerated graphics over the network? That is where
OpenGL over X really shines. On the client side there is a lot passed over
the network when you send the graphics, so you want to be using display lists
or the more contemporary vertex buffer objects, vertex arrays, etc. One you
get those over the network, they stay on the server side, and only short
messages go across the network (usually TCP). That is _if_ the software is
written properly. Great design if you ask me.

Also, in the context of an application running on a "desktop" or a workstation,
the command line would not be popular. There are ergonomic and market reasons
for needing a windowing system. People want their email reader on the same
desktop as their high-performance graphics.

You will find arguments for and against what you are talking about. I err on
the side of "hardware is fast enough for what I need to use Xlib" and I stick
with it. Go with it and thank me later.

Most people write software for Qt, Tcl/Tk, Motif, etc. There is no choise
there.