X-Window System is what makes everything appear so friendly on the screen in LINUX.

The X-window system is a system-level application, or rather, a process that handles the display in Linux. Basically, what you see on your screen is coming from X. X-“talks” to the graphics display device (the graphics processor) and tells it what to display. As X interacts with the hardware at basic level, programmers need not be bothered about giving instructions to the video card for any display (mind you, the GUI taxes a system heavily). With the difficult job being taken care of, programmers only need to give instructions to X saying “move window 1 to position x” or “minimize window 2” or “refresh window 3 every 5 seconds”. The X concept came about when a GUI for UNIX was being worked out. It was released in 1984 by the “Athena Project”, an academic project undertaken at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was taken over in 1998 by a the X Consortium, which has been maintaining the standards for X ever since. The X specifications are freely available for further development, and Linux developers adopt these specifications and called it the Xfree86. Xfree86, like its base-the X-is very versatile, with various options that developers can use to make different windows (or apps) display differently. X follows a client-server architecture.