I surreptitiously ran this on my wife's Linux laptop while she was using it. She called out from the other room "it's snowing on my laptop!" Thanks h2odragon and HN, I had completely forgotten xsnow existed and it made for a lovely surprise this morning. :)
Back in the day, it wasn't uncommon that the security configuration of an X workstation was open to external windows/display. e.g. you could run a program on your system, but target your neighbor's display.
I think universities did this to make it easier to help/troubleshoot a workstation remotely, but once you figured out the commands, xroach was one of my favorites to run on another machine.
If you're using Ubuntu a variant called oneko [1] is still available in the repositories (not sure about the differences, it looks like the xneko that I remember)
&action=purge clears their cache, not mine. Instead of rending the page every visit, they cache them for obvious performance gains. But that can cause issues for things involving dates. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:File_cache
Going beyond things like After Dark, there was a novelty commercial Windows program where you could attack your desktop with comical firearms and explosives. The name of it escapes me. It wasn't well-known, but it was cute for about 5 minutes.
I remember that one. I have to say I miss the CDs loaded with what we'd call theming assets today. Sound themes, sound files for all those desktop apps that let you pick sound files for when your render finished or Lotus alarm went off or whatever.
Color themes for your desktop. Wallpapers, icons, some fonts and even some clip art both in EPS and BMP. Browse by category. Work assets, sure. But also family, holiday, history...
This could be done incredibly well today, but it isn't, that I know of. We've made big strides but I think there's still plenty of room for this important little stuff.
One place I worked at we had a nice little 'golf clap' when the build worked. Then of course you had to have the the 'missed the putt groan' when it failed. Nice feedback from 3 offices over and you did not have to sit and watch it. Fun times...
Yeah the feedback effect is great. I built a phased timer with espeak for feedback and after a while the default voice had me wishing for ASMR-style TTS of some sort...it was just too harsh.
At a friend's new years eve party many moons ago we hacked up a copy of xsnow to drop pastel-colored confetti on the living room wall via the entertainment center's linux box which had a fancy projector.
Apologies to my old classmates at the university, when during the computer lab sessions I would telnet(!) to their machines and launch at random times xneko and/or xsnow. Seeing their surprised and puzzled reactions from a few rows behind was one of the best silly laughs I've had in my life!
(If you happen to be one of them, track me down, I'm thanking you for your inadvertent participation and will invite you to a well-deserved nice meal.)
I’ve had xsnow start on login every December and January since 1996. However, it did not start last week, but I had not yet investigated why. This explains it; my startup was using the old command line options for version 1.42 of xsnow, not the new version. After some experimentation, my desktop is again covered in snow. All is as it should be.
I think it's more likely due to that native-Wayland windows are not visible to XWayland clients. XWayland clients, however, see all other XWayland clients' windows.
It ignored XWayland windows, too. Even the "welcome at xsnow" one. I don't have any other WM than Sway and i don't really want to install one just to try if xsnow works :D
Edit: looks like it doesn't ignore them after all! But the accumulated snow is hidden "behind" the top edge of the window, so it becomes visible only for a brief moment when i move the window downwards.
Compiz was what got me to try out Linux in the first place - seeing wobbly windows and the desktop cube convinced me that this wasn't just a dry server OS but was actually something that could be fun to use.
Those were very interesting times for the desktop. I remember slooowly backing off all the effects after changing Nvidia drivers and restarting X for the Nth time. :-) Eventually just stuck with nv or nouveau or whatever it was. I loved drawing with particles all over the desktop, but little tweaks here and there started to make the whole thing really complex.
Delightful program, another oldie but a goodie is the 'melt' app which melts down all of the ui elements on your screen. I remember, back in the day, setting my display variable to that of my colleagues and surreptitously running melt.
Xsnow was always on for me around December. I found it even cooler then having my desktops on a transparent cube with a reflection with fish inside and wobbly windows that burn upon closing.
Back in those days there also was a game which i can barely remember: There were two monkey any you need to throw bananas at each others over or through skyscrapers... Does anyone know what game that was?
Same, though I didn't edit Gorillas itself. I played that as a kid, then later (c. 2000) in my Intro to Programming class in middle school, I cloned it in Pascal. I even randomly had it select a day or night background, with a randomly positioned sun or moon. Still think back on that fondly :)
The only skyscraper game I remember was the one where you're flying a plane that's getting lower and lower and you have to bomb the scyscrapers before you crash into them.
I was also reminded of "Neko" so I installed it on my Ubuntu system. To be honest I kind of feel sorry for Neko on large, high resolution displays, it's a lot more work than it used to be on a 14" XGA screen.
The default for the X server was for a long time that everybody on the internet could connect. From today's perspective a bizar situation. Back then, when you logged in on an another computer, you only had to forward the DISPLAY envirnoment variable and applications on the remote host could connect to your local display. Handy, but very insecure.
I think that by 1996 this was no longer the case. However, people that were used to being able to forward displays would commonly use "xhost +" (likely in .profile or similar) to disable these access restrictions.
That also meant you could do things like:
DISPLAY=otherhost:0.0 xwd -root - | xwud -
to take a picture of someone else's screen and display it on your own. I may have the syntax a bit wrong - it's been a couple decades. ;)
In the early Web days, there were some sites that would let you display an application locally (not just on a local network, like a lot of institutional X applications, but across the internet) if you gave it the proper DISPLAY value (and did the right xhost command locally).
We're getting closer to getting full-circle on this, but much better security this time around.
I opened this expecting a completely different xsnow I remember, which simulated video static as a white noise pattern, as if tuned to an empty analog TV channel. Pretty sure it used indexed color palette animation to give it a realistic feel without depending on high pixel update bandwidth.
My Linux desktop in the 90s was always so cozy during winter with xsnow running over top of a beautifully rendered POVray scene (that took several days for my Cyrix 5x86 to render). I do miss those days.
Does anyone know of a macOS version of this? The one linked to from Wikipedia is a pay app. I like my desktop silliness to be old school command-line fun.
The shareware version of Snow from Windows by Rick Jansen linked here doesn't work well with Windows 10, lots of image artifacting from (I assume) old Win32 display calls attempting to animate sprites across the desktop.
Looking for alternatives... found DesktopSnowOK which is freeware, small and portable, but doesn't seem to collect snow on top of the window frames :(
Oh my gosh! I miss that. Do you happen to remember the name of the program that allowed you to use a "hammer" against your screen which would result in the appearance of a broken screen?
I definitely had that as well at some point! Couldn't find it in my little collection of fun programs though. :( I also remember a Star Wars screensaver included with one of their games with Star Wars figures running around on the screen, shooting holes in your windows, etc...
If I had to guess, Electron probably opens up a hidden main window and uses that to launch its different components (the chromium UI process and node backend). The snow most likely would only apply to the hidden main window.
Here's a pretty exhaustive list:
https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/