Display managers were starting the X server and then immediately drawing a background on top of it, which meant you saw the stipple for a fraction of a second a

Display managers were starting the X server and then immediately drawing a background on top of it, which meant you saw the stipple for a fraction of a second and it was just kind of jarring. These days the X server commonly won't even draw its own background, it'll just inherit the boot framebuffer contents and then draw over them, so you go straight from boot splash to login prompt without flicker.