There isn’t a lot of difference between its dull and its bright state. If Haiku stalled while booting would a less tech-savy (or vision-impaired) user be able to describe where it stalled?
these icons are really mostly eyecandy. As they won’t help with a bughunt very much, since you can’t pinpoint the failure, I don’t think it’s an especially crucial aspect that has to be fixed. However, if you’d like to work on improving it, go right ahead.
Since the inactive icons are also greyscale, I could imagine a touch of colour would make the active state more obvious. Maybe a small green/golden cpu circuit board in the middle would work well.
it doesn't look like a cpu chip but some generic or at best old microchip.
This boot stage is all about CPU-specific initialization, not memory or whatever other chip kind.
If someone could come with a great-looking icon which could fix this two issues at once, I guess everybody will agreed to switch for it.
I know I will.
For both cosmestic and icon meaning clarity reasons.