Google Announces Chrome OS, For Release Mid-2010 1089
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by
timothy
from the bring-on-the-shiny dept.
from the bring-on-the-shiny dept.
Zaiff Urgulbunger writes "After years of speculation, Google has announced Google Chrome OS, which should be available mid-2010. Initially targeting netbooks, its main selling points are speed, simplicity and security — which kind of implies that the current No.1 OS doesn't deliver in these areas! The Chrome OS will run on both x86 and ARM architectures, uses a Linux kernel with a new windowing system. According to Google, 'For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.' Google says that this new OS is separate from Android, as the latter was designed for mobile phones and set-top boxes, whereas Chrome OS is designed 'for people who spend most of their time on the web.'" The New York Times' coverage is worth reading, and there are stories popping up all over the web.
Competition is good, baby! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is excellent news, because a commercial vendor with *lots* of clout will - finally! - push Linux to OEMs. Like Android, they really want to go after the OEM market with this one. Don't be fooled by the "it's mainly for web browsing" spin - You might not run AutoCAD or Photoshop yet (or ever) on it, but apps (especially HTML5 enabled apps) for home users will follow, targeting the XP/Vista Home Edition user types. And this would be sweet for corporate desktop deployments -- no virus hassles, little to update, most stuff stored on the server (assuming they get offline support sorted out well, of course).
Fingers crossed that Google's "Linux" will have more polish than what's there in distros so far. Microsoft "love our licensing or leave" and Linux distros "we're open source so live with the flaws" will then both be on notice.
Interestingly, Chrome OS is apparently a bare-bones Linux + a "new windowing system" + the Chrome browser.
I can't wait to see what the new windowing system is. I'd really like to see some innovation there, much like OSX created an amazing GUI layer on top what is essentially Mach/BSD. The challenge to Microsoft aside, this will be a wake-up call to Gnome/KDE. The good news is, because this ought to be open source, the OSS community can really get behind this and improve other products.
And oh, anyone else notice the irony that the Chrome _browser_ for Linux seems largely like an afterthought right now? Still, way to go, Google.
Native Client (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Chrome OS focusing on speed, simplicity and security does not imply Windows cannot deliver in these areas. It's just an alternative operating system, and has yet to prove itself. The summary sound rather, well, dumb.
Oh, don't beat around the bush. I'll come right out and say it. I think Windows 7 is fast, safe, and simple to use. I have Vista, Win7 and Ubuntu 8 on my machine, each with its own drive, and while Vista is a tad bit better than Ubuntu, Win7 runs rings around both, and is easier to use than either. I do not think I have enjoyed using Windows this much since NT first got the Win95 shell.
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:5, Interesting)
So then really this Chrome OS will be a Linux distribution. Technically right?
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:5, Interesting)
You and me both, but I'm a little confused. What do they mean by "windowing system"? Are they doing a rewrite of X11, or do they mean they are designing new window decorations and widgets (e.g. gtk or qt), or do they mean the whole desktop environment (e.g., kde, gnome)?
If it's a replacement for X11, why are they doing that? I could see that maybe X11 has too much legacy code and really isn't designed to be the most efficient for a single screen laptop where you don't need an X windows server per se, but on the other hand, I can't imagine that they are going to need something that can outperform X11 for gpu intensive applications like gaming development. I'd love to be wrong about that last bit though. Whatever they mean by it though, it'll be nice to see.
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't this sound a lot like iPhone 1.0, when SJ told developers to use "Safari" as the app framework?
Still, I guess nobody does web dev like google.
Mcdonaldsoft rival at last! (Score:5, Interesting)
No matter how scary google's power is the main things are that:-
1) They are using Linux
2) They WILL make deals with computer manufacturers to get the OS preinstalled.
3) They will opensource the code
The only people who should fear this O.S is MS and existing Linux distros - although the competation and the opensourcing of the code will benifit the entire community.
I'm sure MS will still be the best at saying 'Have a nice day' and flipping CD's.
Re:Chrome is the new Emacs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Chrome is a nice operating system, but it could do with a decent web browser.
I'm sure Firefox will be one of the first big applications ported onto this "new windowing system" in ChromeOS... They wouldn't want ot miss this marketing opportunity!
(And it would be a good idea, actually - having a decent web browser that blocks all the ads that Chrome won't.)
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe. But not really.
Most distributions of Linux follow a lot of common standards.
Similar directory structure. Similar Apps installed...
If you just take the Linux Kernel then just build an OS on top of that you would have something dramatically different then a Linux Distribution.
Lets look at OS X. OS X is based off a Unix Kernel. But it isn't much of Unix Distribution. Apple just left Unix compatibility so they can market it.
A (rushed) move to counter bing.com? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Fear (Score:1, Interesting)
The positive aspect is that even giant soulless corporations have decided that open source is in their best interests. Maybe once the spyware is stripped out there will be some small thing of use to us left.
Why would I want this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:3, Interesting)
But in terms of innovation and functionality, X11 is second to none.
Amen.
It does have it's own challenges (being somewhat difficult to configure on its own for non-technical users), but the flexibility it affords is awesome.
... and it's a server too! Maybe if we'd spent the last 15 years working on a standard X11-like network protocol instead of hacking stateless application GUIs out of scripted marked-up text, we'd have a more useful Internet than we do now. But I digress.
Loves me X, I do! :)
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:3, Interesting)
Nope, its a Linux distribution because it uses the Linux kernel. What you are used to is many GNU/Linux distributions. But there are other distrubtions out there. Gentoo is very different from a lot of other Linux distributions, but it still falls into the GNU category because by default it comes with most of the stand GNU utilities.
Someone needs to make a chart or something.
Re:Fast web OS needed! (Score:2, Interesting)
And when you click it it loads in a second, instead of the several minutes my Outlook used to take to even be barely useable. The choice is clear, sluggish native apps are becoming obsolete, and lightweight online apps are becoming more and more reliable. And when you only use these kind of netapps, why bother installing a bloated OS.
Lately, this confuses me a lot. NATIVE, LOCAL applications are actually slower and more sluggish then networked, script-based apps. I mean, shouldn't the native, local apps be far more superior to scripted Internet-based apps when it comes to speed and response time; no matter how much you can optimise the rendering and script engines? It doesn't seem logical to me, anyways...
Re:Uh huh. (Score:4, Interesting)
It has a lot more potential on the desktop than you suggest. Imagine dual booting between Windows and the Google Chrome OS. You could boot nearly instantly into the Google OS to browse the web in complete security. The Google OS could also run from a VM for secure web browsing as well. Windoz users becoming routinely p0wned will be a thing of the past.
Will it support Internet Explorer? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with X11 is that it is a very old design and an extreme pain to develop with directly because of the API 'aesthetics'.. but it would be much much harder to replace it with something from scratch.
But there are dozens, if not hundreds of libraries which address that particular problem. I don't think anyone talks to X directly any more, it would be a bit like programming in assembly.
And an awful lot of the legacy crud of X seems to be replaced nowadays (although that's still work in progress I suppose). So we'll presumably end up with old compatibility stuff and the new standard interfaces.
Re:Chrome is the new Emacs? (Score:1, Interesting)
(And it would be a good idea, actually - having a decent web browser that blocks all the ads that Chrome won't.)
Privoxy [privoxy.org] - It's better than Ad Block Plus - it blocks ad streams to flash sandboxes (hulu) as well as text ads (adsense). And bonus points: it works on all browsers that allow connection through a proxy... which includes chrome.
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:2, Interesting)
You just can't win in the software world
No one escapes. For years Microsoft lead Linux in the driver's department until Linux settled on a driver model and stuck with it. Now, Microsoft redoes their driver model, which honestly needed to be done, but broke compatibility with a bunch of stuff, and now, they are the bad guys for not having enough drivers. So, pretty much, on the same exact issue, compatibility with legacy drivers versus innovation in the kernel, both Linux and Windows have been on both sides.
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh? OS X is *very* UNIX like. So unix like that it's certified as such. It's probably closer to what you might refer to as a "normal" UNIX environment than many others in fact. Open Solaris is *much* further away than OS X is -- it even disposes of the normal UNIX permissioning system, along with many other things.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why Canonical and not any other Linux company, I mean (K/X/Ed)Ubuntu is great, (most of my computers run Kubuntu or Xubuntu), but Google has a particular objective: directing as many as possible users to Google products, this is clearly not the goal of Canonical.
And besides, diversity is good, the goal is not to supersede one monoculture with another - Ok, Google is not the first address as far as diversity is concerned, but still.
It's not that the two are the only players in the FLOSS field, and probably they are not even the best for the specific requirements of netbooks. Fluxbox, Enlightment [enlightenment.org], or even something like Sugar [sugarlabs.org] are much more lightweight and might be better for the functions required. Or even Google has something new and exciting to offer. Anyways, I even doubt that the KDE and Gnome guys actually wouldn't appreciate other ideas being tested.
Re:Why would I want this? (Score:4, Interesting)
The one company to really take a unixish kernel and succeed with it? Apple. Many of your arguments could have been made about OS X and the BSD kernel it is based on. I suspect this will be similarly non recognizable to the other OS's using its kernel, and probably have a similar port ability. Taking all the obvious unix-like parts out of it really is required to get your grandmother to use it on her netbook. Think about explaining
I also think this is going to take the concept of an "app store" to the desktop, which you could certainly argue against, but google is not going to pigeonhole the OS into only web apps. I'd bet body parts this will support Java and some form of native code.
I think it will be an interesting blur between smartphone and laptop functionality, for netbooks. Them saying it is for netbooks is admitting it will not replace a full fledged OS, don't be afraid, other options will always be there. They aren't even aiming at replacing them.
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, these are myths about X. First X does not have "Legacy" code. Code is not like milk where it goes sour after a certain amount of time. Code that is decades can still be perfectly good and in fact newer attempts to implement the same things implementing by older code can actually result in buggier code of poorer quality. X is actually pretty efficient and does not use a lot of memory compared to other GUIs. The core X engines probably use somewhere in the area of a few megabytes.
X also has an extension mechanism where the protocol can be extended to keep up with new features and developments. X is a pretty capable system, and keeps up with all of the most recent needs of GUIs. It also has assured backwards compatability and has become sort of an API standard, so you could always count on an X application running on any X server without having to worry about compatability issues. The network transparent design allows for things that are unthinkable on windows, like running programs on one computer and displaying to another, and displaying programs from several user to one X server, etc.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:5, Interesting)
So it makes sense to provide OS hooks for an alternate UI mode.. Hell there's dedicated VGA mode for games in existing Linux. Gnome/KDE are not light-weight (though X can be), and I can't imagine how you could retool them to be. Much less how you could to this in a way that supports existing KDE/Gnome/X apps.
Remember, we're talking the slowest possible hardware above cell-phone-grade that we're talking about here. Big screen and keyboard, but essentially a cell-phone/PDA on the backend. I wouldn't be surprised if the browser is required to be full screen like on a cell.
Further, there is a serious argument to be made about low-performance devices and the lack of desire to store sensitive / loosable information on them. Viruses + hardware failure + hardware upgrade means losing your data. While some people avidly setup backup strategies, it's applied with lesser diligence to lower-end devices. And if you're buying on the cheap, than backup solutions cost extra thereby defeating the point. Why buy a $100 netbook then have to buy a $90 external backup hard drive?
I'm not saying this isn't valid, I'm saying that there are massive groups of people that are affected by quality-control issues and migration strategies of software vendors including MS, and google is allegedly attempting to obviate that aspect entirely by making low-cost devices 100% online.
I do see a valid use-case.. 3'rd world, poor US citizens, virtually every high school/elementary school.
Of course google is merely trying to promote it's online dominance and we should take pause. But other than the OS, I'm not sure that this ties your experience to google (though maybe their search engine/user-profile - but anti-trust will eventually kick in).
No vision (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's open source and has a unified API, you're overlooking the fact that this is now real competition to Windows. Brand name? Check. R&D budget? Check. Third party support? Check. Linux kernel? Check. Imagine Canonical with billions of dollars.
Hell, if it's actually a brand new WM this will probably take the top distro spot the day after release. Just providing developers with a consistent platform that requires the investment of one working computer and an internet connection is pretty appealing. Even if it sucks for Linux diehards, the competition will change the landscape for Microsoft and perhaps even Apple.
Imagine an advertising campaign: "Is your computer broken? Just stop by your local Starbucks or Staples and pick up your free copy of Google OS. After making room on your hard drive, it will load a new and secure operating system that will allow you to browse the internet, play Solitaire, and write letters with it's included office suite. Once it's loaded, you'll have the option of recovering data and backing it up online for free so you'll never have to worry about data loss again."
Yeah. Some eyebrows were just raised in Redmond and Cupertino.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Great. I'm sure current applications will be compatible, nothing will break, all the libs will support the compiles, and so on.
Why would any of that concern Google?
They'll be offering a cut-down OS, probably with a new windowing system based on Android, which offers opportunities to develop web apps in the future which truly span the gap between connected desktop apps and web apps. They won't be concerned with porting existing Linux apps over, and neither will their users, who will be buying a netbook to use google mail, some sort of IM app and the internet, and not much more.
It's not even clear if you'll be able to write binary apps for the system at all (they mention web apps and nothing else). Supporting Linux apis would just slow them down, and it probably won't be X based anyway.
This is a foundation for a new generation of apps which aren't beholden to binary APIs controlled by the likes of Microsoft. In parallel with Chrome it lets them dictate the future of web/desktop integration, and start really pushing HTML5 features, and online/offline integration, rather than being continually held back by Microsoft's attempts to hobble the web and tie it to Windows.
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:2, Interesting)
Crunchpad, anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why I like Win7 better than XP (Score:3, Interesting)
(I am curious. I do not mean to challenge your statement. I have used neither Vista nor Windows 7.)
I've been in so many flamewars that it wouldn't matter to me if you were... :-) One of the good things about getting older is learning to take online stuff less personally. When I get to the point that I can read anything without getting ticked off or angered by it, I feel I will have accomplished something in life.
Ok, as to why I like Win7 better than XP. These are not in any order...
1) I've never actually been a great XP fan. XP was always a bit too cute for me. So, for me, a Windows that looks more professional and not so cute, but still feature rich, is nice to see.
2) Improvements in common dialogs are huge. I'm a developer. I work with files a lot. Having a good common set of file dialogs in all applications is a really nice touch. I think Vista's dialogs were better than XP because the search was nice and the left hand side of "important" stuff was welcome. For Windows 7, the addition of the library feature, basically, allowing you to put your own sets of folders onto the common file dialog is an absolute godsend. It allows me to organize files by work activity, so, I can have whatever paint program, development software, ftp software, whatever, all have a common entry on the file dialog for my website, for example. I love it so much that I dread even using XP or Linux for not having this feature.
3) The explorer.exe doesn't lock up as much in Vista or Win7 as it did in XP. Like, when the PC wakes up, or gets busy, Explorer.exe on my machine can go out to lunch. I've not noticed this as much as in Win7.
4) I love the inclusion of the Office 2007 Ribbon Bars into the Windows 7 distribution. I'm reading a lot about how it works in the SDK and I'm excited about using it in an application that I'm working on.
5) Native 64 bit Windows in the mainstream. Yeah, I know there was a 64 bit Windows XP out there. I had it. But it was so rare that you really couldn't write for it. Since most vendors are now defaulting to 64 bit Vistas and will probably default to 64 bit Win7, I think we will thankfully be able to write for 64 bit native mode and that to me is a wonderful thing. I know high level languages are in vogue but for a tinkering thing, to me, I like getting in there and doing a bit of assembly language stuff.
6) Reading ISOs out of the box. Linux has had this feature now for, geez, it seems like a decade, but Windows never put it together. Now Win7 has. It's just nice to be able to do it without digging around for some cheesy utility.
7) The Windows 7 taskbar. I like the way window are stacked up. I like the inclusion of Gnome style rearranging of icons. I like the way they have pushed off all the dozens of icon notifications into the shell tray onto their own little land. I like the OS/2-esque Workplace shell ability to make your own folders off of the task bar.
8) Native API enhancements. There's Direct2D, DirectWrite, DirectX stuff. There's stuff in there for user space threads that I was used to making fun of Linux for back in the day but suddenly it appears the Linux people had a point. There's NUMA awareness in threading. Some of this stuff has dribbled out but having it all in one Windows distribution makes me more confident that I can use that feature.
That's what I can think of, off the top of my head.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not to put down any effort to get rid of X11, rather, my guess that cross-operating system application porting will once again go to hell, cause conditional compiles, and much Zantac consumption.
All of which matters ... not at all. The whole purpose of the device is to run ONE application, the browser. Everything else is there to support that.
I suppose they'll have to design some other applications, to manage machine-specific configuration (WiFi settings, etc.) but maybe they'll just do that through a localhost web interface as well.
Google doesn't care if it's impossible to build standard applications on it; actually from their perspective it's probably a plus if you can't. (And I expect they'll probably lock it down to make it intentionally hard to do.) Easier to support.
Based on what's been made available so far, the device is squarely targeted at people who do all their work in the browser, or could start doing it. It's essentially a thin client to Google's web apps.
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows App Compatibility? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Please let there be no X! (Score:1, Interesting)
A standard mechanism for adding extensions, so new features can be added without breaking backwards compatibility (most of the features of X11 that you use today are implemented as extensions).
This makes UNIX Haters' Handbook criticism completely relevant.
X can be coerced into doing many things that people want. You can do many things people want in Visual Basic 6.0 too, it doesn't mean it is something anyone would want to depend on if there was any alternative.
X is crap, crap has been worked around with ugly hacks to do what it should have been doing since day 0.
Just like permissions on POSIX, X is a blatant case of Stockholm syndrome. Unix permissions suck from a security standpoint and X11 sucks both as a window manager back end and as a network windowing system, no matter what you have come to believe.
I will concede that there isn't any alternative and that none is likely to ever appear, but that doesn't make X11 any better.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:2, Interesting)
They can always do what Microsoft did to get people to use Windows, and what Google already did to get people to use Android on the G1: have it be pre-installed.
You buy the machine, you turn it on, and you're running the software that somebody wants you to. Problem solved.
Re:Automatically or automagically? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's to stop them bundling an Apache and MySQL server, denying access to everyone but 127.0.0.1, and running the apps locally from that server?
Re:Please let there be no X! (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't cost anything. Every modern windowing system is a client-server design. Clients send drawing commands to the server and the server controls the display hardware. X11 lets you select the IPC mechanism, you can either use shared memory and local sockets / pipes (like any other display server) or you can use a network socket. A few examples of when I've found network transparency useful: When only one machine in the lab had a CD burner, I could run the CD-R software on that machine while someone else was using it and displaying the GUI on my machine. I also use it when I play music on the machine connected to my amplifier, so I can display the GUI on my laptop. There are lots of cases where network transparency is useful, and this is only going to increase as people have more computers and better network access. VNC has worse performance than X - particularly when you add something like NX in as a cache - and doesn't let you forward a single application easily.
It is just that I think programs with limited set of features are easier to modify. And ability to change is essential for future proof software.
So you're in favour of X11 then? It separates out policy and mechanism, so you can easily replace the window management or compositing strategy without modifying the core protocol. It has a simple extension mechanism, so you can add support for new features easily. Examples of features added via this mechanism include shared memory support, OpenGL, compositing, shaped windows, and so on. X11 lets you add new features easily without breaking backwards compatibility.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been a Linux user since 1996 and I've watched the entire "Linux on the desktop" debacle unfold. It's sad to see that the
Who are you to tell Google what they can and cannot build? It's about time someone put a face on the Linux desktop other than that of an MS clone. Hopefully it's not just a new window manager but a new window system. X, while great in its day, has run its course. I'd like to something fresh that builds on the concept of using modern graphics hardware to do all the heavy lifting for the GUI instead of clever CPU-intensive hacks on top of Xlib**.
You don't like Google's vision for Linux on netbooks. What's your alternative vision?
** I've written many apps with Xlib. The underlying ideas/primitives that X uses for graphics ops are obsolete so doing anything "cool" (and sometimes useful!) requires using crufty extensions rather than calling routines that are a "natural" part of the system.
Re:X is pretty dang good (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:4, Interesting)
Why? I would think that if we call a Linux distribution put together by Google that includes components beside the Linux kernel (whether developed in house by Google or open source components from third parties) selected by Google and marketed by them under the Chrome OS brand as a "Google OS" and as "Chrome OS", then we would call an OS with the Linux kernel and other components selected by, say, Canonical and marketed under the Ubuntu brand as a "Canonical OS" and as "Ubuntu". We wouldn't call it a "GNU OS" or a "Ruby OS" or a "MySQL OS", just because it includes open source components from those sources, just as we aren't calling "Google Chrome OS" names based on where it acquired third-party open-source components.
Sure, if GNU created its own Linux distribution (or, say, released the HURD), calling that a "GNU OS" would be analogous to calling Google Chrome OS a "Google OS", but that's a different story altogether.
Re:Uh huh. (Score:3, Interesting)
Google has a particular objective: directing as many as possible users to Google products
That is of course true. But I think the OS will further that aim in a more subtle manner than the obvious.
I think that right now, they're just pushing for mass acceptance of web apps as a mainstream mode of computer use. Even if it's other people's web apps. They can grow the pool so it's big enough for everyone to play.
Of course they'd prefer you to use Google Docs over some competitor's web word processor; and most people probably will do. But if only for regulatory reasons - and not looking evil - they'll coexist with such competitors.
The second way they can win, is that if some startup invents a web app that Google's not doing, they might well choose to host it on Google App Engine.
Re:Please let there be no X! (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh my god, dude. Do not read the documentation on the modern WDDM... it will break your heart. You're like a child whose puppy died at the vet and no one has broken the news to you... you're still.. just thinking that he lives on a farm somewhere.
I can't believe you think these features are advanced enough to brag about.
Do yourself a favor and boot up Windows on your box and watch a video... enjoy the effortless sound support, and smooth video acceleration. Or activate DWM and move your windows around, watch them not tear... watch the compositing layer not crash. Start up a game and be entranced by what modern graphics hardware is capable of!
Why, you've just listed off a bunch of really basic implementations of hardware acceleration, really life support for X to make it not seem ancient, and yet they're just words. When it all comes down to it, it underperforms in almost any metric of display performance... you can't port games to it, you can't easily accelerate flash on it. It's the reason JavaFX came out on Windows and Mac first, despite the fact that Sun is a major UNIX vendor.
What else is there to say that hasn't been said? It's still constrained through the filesystem socket layer... so you'll always be making more syscalls when performing basic drawing commands. DRI is not broad or extensible enough to take advantage of advanced features on modern graphics hardware, and DRM is fundamentally flawed. It will have to be redesigned if you are ever to get the entirety of OpenGL working.
If you think X is "impressive" because you are able to fire cryptic commands into the CLI and get windows to pop up on different machines, then you need to stay away from discussions on linux for the destkop and restrain yourself. Your corner case is irrelevant on modern hardware, it's difficult to use, and it's people like you who are keeping UNIX from ever having modern display capabilities with your antiquarian usage habits and loud activism thereof. Just keep using X and let regular users have an at least comparable or competitive display system on the linux platform. Let go!
Re:Competition is good, baby! (Score:3, Interesting)
But Apple didn't start from scratch - they started from Nextstep, Steve Jobs's earlier Unix GUI. Note that Nextstep isn't that much newer than X, and it shares some of the things that often get criticized in X, like the client-server architecture.