yes, but it may not resemble the linux you've come to know and love. they've already said that it has a custom window manager, i.e., not X11. so who knows what else they've left out.

X11 is not a window manager. X11 provides the low-level API for drawing to the screen and for interfacing with input devices. Metacity (GNOME), KWin (KDE) etc. are window managers. IIRC, X11 does offer a very basic window manager, but nobody actually uses that.

A new window manager shouldn't be a problem. If it behaves properly, you will hardly notice the difference.

It will actually be interesting if they manage to replace X11. AFAIK, many people hate X11 to the core. Heck, the Qt and KDE developers refuse to work around X11 bugs, hoping that pressure from users will somehow cause the X11 devs to fix them. Of course, I don't know the full situation, since I stopped paying attention to politics in the Linux world a while ago.

Yes, X11 does come with a very very basic window manager.

It's been a LOONNGGG time (I switched to windows XP) since I have had to install one, but I believe you can see it by by taking

     exec $foo

out of your x11rc, then running startx. Right clicking will get you an xterm, and you can launch things that require a GUI from there...

yeah, i know that. but if they took out X11, then it stands to reason that all the standard window managers went with it.