XFree86 celebrates its 10th anniversary. X is well designed, but the design assumptions it makes are disastrous for the personal desktop (or laptop) market. Just as Apple created Quartz, the Linux community will have to come up with a standard that at least allows changing color-depth on the fly, and does not suffer from degraded performance on the desktop in the name of `network transparency’. On that point, Directfb may be a good pointer towards the future.