Since I heard of the X11 vs Wayland debate I wondered if on *NIX and Linux other window systems/protocols existed. From there I read about Sun NeWS, Bellcore MGR, Bell Labs rio (preceded by mpx and mux on the Blit, and 8½), SunView and HP Windows/9000 (this last one is rather obscure).

Today I stubled upon a rather obscure window system that was being developed on Linux between 1999 and 2003: Fresco. As far as I've seen it was written in C++ and leveraged CORBA and GGI.

If any of you got the opportunity to try it back in the day, could you describe how it was?

I also stumbled upon these two related projects: KGI and GGI, which dealed with graphic acceleration, drivers, input and rendering.

Whatever happened to all these projects? Did they failed to meet their goals?

Links: - https://web.archive.org/web/20061123090303/http://www.fresco.org/index.html - https://github.com/stefanseefeld/fresco - http://www.ibiblio.org/ggicore/links.html#games - http://www.ibiblio.org/ggicore/index.html - http://www.kgi-project.org/index.html