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. This pattern is technically called a stipple.
What you’re seeing is pretty important and came to symbolize a lot for me as a computer practitioner.
↫ Matt T. Proud
The X bootup pattern is definitely burnt onto my retina, as it probably is for a lot of late ’90s, early 2000s Linux users. Setting up X correctly, and more importantly, not breaking it later, was almost an art at the time, so any time you loaded up your PC and this pattern didn’t greet you, you’d get this sinister feeling in the pit of your stomach. There was now a very real chance you were going to have to debug your X configuration file, and nobody – absolutely nobody – liked doing that, and if you did, you’re lying.
Matt T. Proud dove into the history of the X stipple, and discovered it’s been part of X since pretty much the very beginning, and even more esoteric X implementations, like the ones used by Solaris or the various commercial versions, have the stipple. He also discovered several other variants of the stipple included in X, so there is a chance your memory might be just a tiny bit different.
The stipple eventually disappeared at around 2008 or so, it disappeared as part of the various efforts to modernise, sanitise, and speed up the Linux boot process on desktops. On modern distributions still using X, you won’t encounter it anymore by default, but in true X fashion, the code is still there and you can easily bring it back using a flag specifically designed for it, -retro, that you can use with startx or your X init file.
There’s a ton more information in Proud’s excellent article, but this one paragraph made me smile:
I will remark that in spite of my job being a software engineer, I had never spent a lot of time looking at the source code for the X Server (XFree86 or X.Org) before. It’s really nuts to see that a lot of the architecture from X10R3 and X11R1 still persists in the code today, which is a statement that can be said in deep admiration for legacy code but also disturbance from the power of old decisions. 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. I say that with the utmost respect to the X Window System as a technology and an ecosystem. I’ll keep using X, and I will be really sad when it’s no longer possible for me to do so for one reason or another, as I’m extremely attached to it quirks. But it’s clear the future is limited.
↫ Matt T. Proud
We all have great – and not so great – memories of X, but I am really, really happy I no longer have to use it.
Interestingly it lives on in OpenBSD’s actively maintained fork of X, called Xenocara. On that OS it’s referred to as “root weave” and it is on by default unless you override it in /etc/X11/xenodm/Xsetup_0.
I am glad to see OpenBSD keeping the faith, and OpenBSD was one of the last places I saw the stipple with consistency (it was my daily driver up until recently due to needing to retire the hardware it was running on). I had been under the wrong impression that Xenocara remained purely a direct fork of XFree86 to this day, as I checked the Xenocara web site and its historic revisions using Internet Archive, and it indicates the X.Org lineage instead.
I wonder how they did this pre-bf33b16568fa6773bd68ad4f13879032c23093ea: https://github.com/openbsd/xenocara/commit/bf33b16568fa6773bd68ad4f13879032c23093ea
And Xenocara definitely keeps the party_like_its_1989 behavior: https://github.com/openbsd/xenocara/blob/83d854c8942736fe96ad037b1acb258d656d1c93/xserver/dix/window.c#L673.
I don’t know what you did to your poor X config file, but being a Linux user since 97 there have been plenty of things that have annoyed me throughout the years, but X was not really one of them. Sure in the early years you had to manually edit it, like you had to with multiple config files in general, but it generally just worked. And it is not like i was just lucky and chose the right distro, i tried pretty much all there was, including Linux From Scratch a few times.
Until a few years ago i would still use the remote display feature of X regularly, often displaying the applications on a Windows desktop (yes, you can get an X server for Windows). There are now remote options for Wayland, but suddenly the no fuss Linux suddenly feels like we have teleported 25 years back in time and have to fiddle to get simple stuff working.
I do believe X is so old that replacing the old beast IS a good thing, but i just wish someone with a better vision had started a project that would have gained traction instead of Wayland.
Troels,
+1
X is an old & complex beast and I am a huge of simplicity! I like simple tools that do their job well. Retiring X was never my criticism for wayland, The execution should have been better with a plan to incorporate what real users needed from the start. It would have been a less bumpy transition.and gained traction faster.
Definitely a case of “apple” vs. “orange”. Not the evolution of “what was”, but a completely different implementation.
X11 is to Wayland as Windows is to Linux.
I think if you look at it that way, then there’s less problem accepting it for what it is.
With that said, if we didn’t have XWayland, we’d be in a world of hurt right now. Is it sufficient? No. So, there will still be pain, but a whole lot less pain.
I will miss the X Window System and what it was trying to do, things that Wayland isn’t designed to do.
I’m hoping that by the time people are ready to produce the list about “all the loss” as we move to Wayland, that we no longer care. But I’ll admit, right now, that is difficult to envision.
Yes, i know that Wayland actually only replace a subset of what is X, and i think this is the really the problem with it. I couldn’t really care less about the low level graphics subsystem, All the stuff that suddenly need to be handled by environments extending the compositor and all the other basic parts of X that Wayland has no answer to were the important bits of X,
I strongly believe they should have started making a modern replacement of all the higher level stuff first and have desktop environments integrate that, and then later in the process swap out the low level. Now we have a fragmented mess and who knows if the basic functionalities will ever work and even more if they will ever be united again across environments and toolkits.
What really matters is stuff like font rendering, color profiles, remote desktop capabilities (even if not per window like X), copy paste handling, dpi scaling, screen shotting/screen recording, not bringing down everything when the subsystem crashes, and much more.
To me, Wayland kinda feels like we got a replacement for the Linux kernel, but in the process we also lost most of the standard libraries and each application must make their own replacement, and at the same time you can no longer use pipes in your command lines because. uhhh, security!