He uses X11 sometimes! I couldn't quite tell what the DE was, but it might have been XFCE. He found it easier to show us comics in X11 than in textmode emacs, so he swapped to the desktop to do that.
This was close to midnight in London when I was helping him get his stuff back to his accommodations (his bag is frikkin HEAVY). He needed to rest for a minute, and he whipped out his laptop to laugh at comics he'd written.
As far as I've seen X11 has always been considered Free without-strong-copyleft by rms/GNU.
They were /not/ in favor of the proprietary Motif desktop environment, nor the (at the time, non-FLOSS Qt library dependent) KDE (C++) environment, hence the FSF creating the GNOME (C) environment. "...GNOME and KDE
will remain two rival desktops, unless some day they can be merged
in some way. Until then, the GNU Project is going to support its
own team vigorously. Go get ’em, gnomes!"
> ...a quote directly from Bostic himself. I asked him about it, after reading this FSF page: "People sometimes ask whether BSD too is a version of GNU, like GNU/Linux. The BSD developers were inspired to make their code free software by the example of the GNU Project, and explicit appeals from GNU activists helped persuade them..."
This was close to midnight in London when I was helping him get his stuff back to his accommodations (his bag is frikkin HEAVY). He needed to rest for a minute, and he whipped out his laptop to laugh at comics he'd written.