[hakfoo]

I think one thing that sort of disappeared was the vision of thin clients everywhere. X11 is an obvious thin-client solution.

Thin client for home use seems like a winning proposition. Rather than giving the kids a Raspberry Pi 400 or garage-sale P4 when they want their own computer, you could hook up another X terminal to a large shared Ryzen box. The hardware gets more efficiently used, files can easily be shared and centrally backed up, and nobody ends up being the guy with the cast-off or otherwise inferior PC.

[moring]

I think quite the opposite happened, just not on X11 level. The web browser is essentially a thin client nowadays. The fact that you have full client-side scripting is one thing that was IMHO a bit underdeveloped in classical thin-client systems because with that you can mask network latency much easier (though, admitted, I don't know a lot about how X11 handles this).

[moomin]

Don't agree at all. The web browser is essentially a standardized computer on which to run your fat client systems like SPAs. The browser can run arbitrary computation locally.

[moomin]

The problem being that X thin clients back then were more powerful than desktop PCs at the time. Even now they're more expensive than a Raspberry Pi, so it's more economically efficient to buy one of those.