WHOM is right :-)

Who cares. Seriously, counting Android as Linux users is as crazy as counting OS X users as UNIX, in both cases the *NIX underpinnings are only used as a hardware abstraction to host an alien environment to the typical Linux/GNU/X we typically call "Linux" as a shorthand. More power to em and all, but lets not make Apples to Oranges comparisions.

> "Traditional Linux users" who care about network transparency
> and other such things are fast becoming minority

Well take yer asses off and do your clone of all the bad ideas the existing userbase fled screaming from. It is Free Software after all. Here is a clue: Most of us came to *NIX because we saw the benefits and could also see the horrid mess the DOS/Windows world was. Why do we now want to toss one of the most wonderful ideas in computing to become more like the mass market drones? The network is the computer, the computer is the network. It isn't just a marketing slogan for some of us.

Besides, I never understood why suddenly everything needs to be rendered client side as bitmaps. Extend X to give it the mechanisms to support things it can't currently do and make sure they can run over the wire. Why can't X do the modern font tricks, compositing or whatever over the wire? Why isn't the default scalable SVG artwork? Isn't it normally sufficient to note that Apple does something enough to end an argument? Well they do Display Postscript (ok, they had to modernize the terminology to Display PDF) on OS X so obviously the idea is still mainstream, right?

Is it good that Linux is finally getting the last chunk of device support and taking over mode setting and general driving of the video hardware? Of course. Is it good that makes it easier for upstarts to experiment with new display systems? Of course! Might this someday lead to replacement for X? Perhaps. But any replacement has to be able to do the things X does if the target is a general computing environment instead of embedded. We have decades of existing apps and little desire to toss em all and start over. If we wanted to do that we could all just ditch the whole stack and go run Haiku or something.