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Originally written by Conspiracy Duck:

Re 95v98: Primary differences will tend to be embedded IE and gradiated titlebars.

Re the poll: There is no such thing as X Windows. From the X11R6 manual:

"The X Consortium requests that the following names be used when referring to this software:

X
X Window System
X Version 11
X Window System, Version 11
X11"

X is entirely different in many ways from Microsoft Windows. The two could be considered contemporary; the Microsoft Windows project started in '81 and was public in '83 while X started in '84. Windows 1.0 was released in '85; X was getting around by '86. There was no comparing the two at the time -- X was a full-featured client-server video architecture, whereas Windows was a glorified DOS shell that couldn't even overlap windows.
The first version of Windows that had any major significance was Windows 3 and 3.1, available in 1990 and 1992 respectively.
As to how Linux works into this whole deal, it was in 1991 when Windows had just reached some semblance of maturity and X Window System had reached its 7th year that Linux 0.0.1 was released by a comp sci student by the name of Linus Torvalds.

Using X doesn't imply using Linux. X servers are available for pretty much every Unix, as well as Mac OS X (XFree86 on Darwin) and even, yes, Microsoft Windows.

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