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> The dithering is intentional, not due to an inability to display additional colors. While back in the 80s and 90s dithering was used to work around lack of co

> The dithering is intentional, not due to an inability to display additional colors. While back in the 80s and 90s dithering was used to work around lack of color, nowadays it is almost always used as a stylistic choice. I'm pretty sure the limited number of colours is exactly why CDE does this. At the time it was popular most X terms could only do a palette of 256 colours (from a larger number, I think 65535). Thus the dithering. In fact if you opened up an image viewer like xv (xview) it would switch palettes and make your other windows look weird. Just because it needed all the colours to display a picture decently. 24-bit + alpha channel greatness only became mainstream after CDE was already a thing of the past.

badsectoracula 5y ago
Yes, as i wrote in the part you quoted, back in the 80s and 90s this was a problem however nowadays the dithering is an aesthetic choice and not a CDE limitation. You can even see in the screenshot the Firefox icon using true color output (it sadly doesn't use alpha blending though, so this might actually be a CDE or Motif limitation - it shouldn't be impossible to fix it as the X server can do alpha blending nowadays but it needs someone to figure out where the limitation is and implement it)