On Thu, 26 Feb 2015, Hendrik Boom wrote:

> > Prior to recent (at least in Debian) releases, Xorg came with the
> > classic checkered monochrome pattern, i'm cool with that :)
>
> No. The checkered monochrome background flickered horribly on some
> monitors. Bad default.

AFAIK it was there exactly for that, so that one could tune the
frequency and check the distortion of the monitor. That was back in the
times in which we used to configure XF86Config by hand and sometimes
having ad-hoc modelines for non-standard monitors.

ciao