Great books to read, judging from the title. The 1992 book is post MIT's Athena Project, so it may be a good one to read. I'd welcome a concise review on this list. I found this very brief whitepaper, which has some nice historical info: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/73a5/99cf5e526d3499fa9748dfaf9bdd58a89e1f.pdf The references include your book and the classic book on OSs by Tanenbaum. There is a slight irony here regarding X. The stir is about Wayland, and how it may be the new thing that replaces X: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29 http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Is-Wayland-the-New-X But maybe this is old news, as I have not seen anything on my desk yet. But what do I know...