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Ask HN: What's Your Desktop Background?

11 points by DiggyJohnson ↗ HN
I have a small collection of images: "Earth in the Background". It's currently only four images, each different photographs from spacecraft and landers that includes the Earth.

The real obvious ones include the original and revisited (2020) Pale Blue Dot photos from the Voyager 1 mission. Closer to home, there is Blue Marble (Apollo 17) and Earthrise (Apollo 8).

My favorites are a view of the horizon on Mars night with Earth and the moon faintly visible in the sky (Curiosity). There's also a good one from Cassini that includes Saturn's rings and Earth, but it makes the screen look cracked.

Anyways, I never really think much about this collection, and throw one on whenever I get a new machine. I prefer quiet backgrounds, nothing too noisy or flashy - I've even had solid colored backgrounds for many years.

What do you use for your desktop background / wallpaper?

20 comments

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mattl
I've had the same background blue color (#64699E) since late 90s when the Rhapsody developer releases were a thing.
DiggyJohnson
I respect that, I have a go to brick (dark red) and legal-paper-yellow hex code I use for solid backgrounds. I'd have to pull out my thinkpad to check though. Solid backgrounds do seem a bit underrated, they do make me feel more focused.
eternityforest
I have a slideshow of natural scenes and fantasy art that I occasionally add too.
billybuckwheat
I stick with a solid colour -- usually a blue green (#088F8F) or a sky blue (#87CEEB).

I don't bother with using images as the background/wallpaper on my desktop any longer if only because I rarely, if ever, see it because application windows cover the desktop.

LinuxBender
Flat colors, no pictures.

Black for daily driver(s). Red for encrypted and sandboxed tunnel networks using fascist firewalls. Purple for heavy logging isolated dirty net for monitoring new malware. Green for new installation being prepped as a PXE/iPXE network install image.

late25
Flat colors, no pictures is what I use too. No distractions, easy on the eyes, improves text readability, and native.
acolderentity
A picture of Cid Kagenou from The Eminence in Shadow
simonblack
Plain blue. No pictures. Pictures would be a waste anyway, as most of the time, the background is hardly visible.

A plain single-color background is the least resource-hungry of background images.

meristohm
I'm familiar with most of the photos you describe and really enjoy coming across them when I look through my photos.

For desktop backgrounds I use either flat colors, whatever I like that comes with Linux Mint, or an image I like from my collection of photographs, which stays until I feel both bored of it whatever I'm doing at the moment. No faces- too distracting.

zzo38computer
I use the stipple pattern which is set by default if you start the X server with the -retro switch (which I use). I do not have any icons and do not use a desktop environment.
patatino
I don’t care, I see the background after login and then not anymore
swah
I alternate between a few just because of the notch on the Macbook. "Dark on the top" walls hide the notch which confuses me a bit. Otherwise always some dark blue/green/black forest/ocean image that makes text more readable.