In Part 1 of the series we looked at the early X window managers that ran on X display protocol based systems. The scale and range of them was from the very beginning where a user was presented with a menu and windows and little else. In Part 2 of the series we delved into desktop window manager environments, the area in between a full desktop system and a simple window manager; these were window managers which provided things like application bars, icon management of some sort and flexible interfaces to create modules or widgets for the environment but did not include (a lot of...) inherent applications. In the third part of the series we will examine the two main desktops in the X world, a look at the two newer desktop environments that are blurring between application centric/environment centric window managers, some core X technology that can enhance the X experience and finally a look ahead.