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Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple


If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex: Oh, my old friend. How it’s been a long time. Cultural Significance For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen for the X Window System, specifically the pattern it uses as the background of the root window.

I mean, I get on a technical level why each thing that is managing the X Server takes a different approach (independent development by individual engineers with different design philosophies and requirements), but this just a stupid amount of toil to pass a measly flag. For startup, however, the X Window System only uses the static source code definition (the data backing the_back_lsb or_back_msb variables from dix’s window.c based on your machine’s endianness). Without having looked at the internals of any Wayland implementation, I can sympathize sight unseen with the sentiments that some developers have toward the X Window System: the code is a dead end.

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