X.desktop was an early desktop environment

Desktop environment

In graphical computing, a desktop environment commonly refers to a style of graphical user interface derived from the desktop metaphor that is seen on most modern personal computers. These GUIs help the user in easily accessing, configuring, and modifying many important and frequently accessed...

 graphical user interface

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

 built on the X Window System

X Window System

The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

. It was developed and sold during the late 1980s and early 1990s by IXI Limited

IXI Limited

IXI Limited was a Cambridge, UK-based software company founded in 1988. The company was the leading supplier of windowing software for Unix, supporting all the popular UNIX platforms of the time....

, a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 software house

Software house

A software house is a company whose primary products are software.- Types :There are a number of different types of software houses:*Large and well-known companies such as Microsoft, SAP AG, Oracle Corporation, HP, Adobe Systems, Apple Inc...

 based in Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

. Versions of X.desktop were available for over 30 different UNIX

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 platforms and it was licensed to various vendors, including Compaq

Compaq

Compaq Computer Corporation is a personal computer company founded in 1982. Once the largest supplier of personal computing systems in the world, Compaq existed as an independent corporation until 2002, when it was acquired for US$25 billion by Hewlett-Packard....

, Locus Computing Corporation

Locus Computing Corporation

Locus Computing Corporation was formed in 1982 by Gerald J. Popekto commercialize the technologies developed for the LOCUS distributed operating system at UCLA...

, BiiN

BiiN

BiiN was a company created out of a joint research project by Intel and Siemens to develop fault tolerant high-performance multi-processor computers build on custom microprocessor designs. BiiN was an outgrowth of the Intel iAPX 432 multiprocessor project, ancestor of iPSC and nCUBE.The company was...

 and Acorn Computers

Acorn Computers

Acorn Computers Ltd. was a British computer company established in Cambridge, England, in 1978. The company produced a number of computers which were especially popular in the UK. These included the Acorn Electron, the BBC Micro, and the Acorn Archimedes...

. Early version of X.desktop used Xlib

Xlib

Xlib is an X Window System protocol client library written in the C programming language. It contains functions for interacting with an X server. These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the details of the protocol...

 and the Athena widgets

Xaw

Xaw is short for the X Window System Athena widget set, which is a set of widgets to implement simple user interfaces based upon the X Toolkit Intrinsics...

; from version 2.0 onwards it was based on the Motif toolkit

Motif (widget toolkit)

In computing, Motif refers to both a graphical user interface specification and the widget toolkit for building applications that follow that specification under the X Window System on Unix and other POSIX-compliant systems. It emerged in the 1980s as Unix workstations were on the rise, as a...

.