I think even if the company goes away we will see this continue. It modern it rust and some if its fundamentals are already used by other projects. Of course not same way, but its not just going away.
I was introduced to UNIX in 1993, Linux in 1995's Summmer, and have lost count how many X Windows desktops or windows managers have come and gone in 32 years.
I wasted too much time tweaking Enlightenment. I remember that was fun but I don't really remember much about actually using it.
OS/2's Workplace Shell feels like the biggest lost opportunity (and has nothing to do with UNIXy stuff). I really liked Rexx and the SOM stuff felt cleaner than what became COM in Windows.
Window Maker/AfterStep were my all time favourites in GNU/Linux world.
I used to be in the GNOME camp during its early days, even wrote a tiny article to The C/C++ User's Journal regarding Gtkmm, nowadays I rather use XFCE.
The original fvwm also holds a special place, that was the first I used in GNU/Linux, back in 1995, and I got to customise it quite a bit.
SOM was great, it also supported implementation inheritance, and had metaclasses concept as well.
I like COM as idea, I dislike how badly Microsoft keeps rebooting the developer experience, and isn't able to provide modern toolig as easy as it was from VB 6, Delphi, C++ Builder. For something that has become the central mechanism how Windows APIs are delivered.
Some underappreciated and forgotten tiling wms that are still viable today:
- ratpoison ("tmux for X11". Ultralight, great for kiosks and similar where you barely want a WM at all)
- stumpwm (ratpoison on steroids in Lisp)
- Xmonad (A bit different tiling dynamic that some prefer. I dig it despite Haskell, not because of it)
- Qtile (Very flexible and easily hackable in python yet reasonably stable and fast. You can reproduce for example the Xmonad or i3 experiences pretty easily)
