6 ms·
As someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes. Some additional e
by vlowrian 1y ago
As someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes.
Some additional examples beyond the OP:
- In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank).
- GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions (see: https://www.tc3.dev/posts/2021-09-04-gnome-3-solid-color-background/ https://www.tc3.dev/posts/2021-09-04-gnome-3-solid-color-bac...).
The pattern here seems pretty clear: a half-baked feature kept alive for niche users, rather than either properly supporting or cleanly deprecating it. Personally, I’d love to simply set an RGB value without needing to generate a custom image. But given the state of things, I’d rather have one solid, well-maintained wallpaper system than flaky background color logic that’s barely hanging on.
- nandomrumber 1y agoI recently acquired a ThinkStation P910 dual CPU Xeon E26xx with 64GB RAM and 1080GTX Quite a capable machine for my uses. Not supported in Windows 11. Maybe with some additional config? Can’t be bothered with something hat might turn out to be fragile and need more maintenance than I can be bothered with. That’s a young man’s gane. Ok, I’m about due to give Linux another tickle anyways. Hmm, which distro… can always give a few a spin. Keep it simple, Pop!_OS. Installed fast, no issues, runs fine, stable. Seems entirely usable. Customisations? Nah, keep it simple. I’ll set a black background though. Nope.
- methuselah_in 1y agogo with gnome fedora! and rest will be history or debian stable.
- RedShift1 1y agoPar for the course with Gnome though, if you like customization, KDE is better.
- ohgr 1y agoAs much as I'd like a machine like that, my 5 year old random Lenovo 10500 desktop is probably more useful as a daily driver machine than an older workstation class machine at the sacrifice of no ECC RAM. I bought it when it was 3 years old and will use it for 4 years then get rid of it before it hits the tail end, the power supply dies or something else goes wrong. You avoid all the weird problems, the depreciation, the energy costs running like that. And you gain things like relatively competent NVMe slots, USB-C and other luxuries. And the single core performance is better than Xeons of the era and earlier. win11 ltsc works perfectly on it. With a solid background :D
- MartinGAugustin 1y ago[flagged]
- loftsy 1y agoJust make a black png and use it as the background?
- doublerabbit 1y agoSure but why should a workaround be required for a feature that should work?
- dizhn 1y agoIf they can't get colors to work, the software should just create the image itself and fake it.
- nandomrumber 1y agoIt’s open source, I’ll “just write the code myself.”
- jeroenhd 1y agoI wouldn't go with Pop_OS with that hardware. The Nvidia GPU isn't supported by the new Nvidia driver and because System76 is hard at work writing Cosmic, their repositories are quite outdated. Support for things like Wayland is quite mediocre in the old drivers. Switching to upstream (Ubuntu) with KDE would probably be more your speed.
- jessekv 1y agoI recently updated Pop OS to the Cosmic Alpha and it is much more to my liking than Gnome 3 ever was. I have an older Nvidia GPU though.
- anal_reactor 1y ago[flagged]
- jraph 1y agoKDE Plasma (on any distro I guess) has clear, easy to reach and easy to use settings for this.
- andrepd 1y ago> GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions There's the peak GNOME experience.
- AHTERIX5000 1y agoOr the display sleep menu which offers choices like 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 and 30 min timeout but no more than that unless you use external config editor.
- nullc 1y agoMy analogous gnome experience was that on my tv-computer I was using 4x scaling, because TV and because my distance vision stinks. At some point they decided 2x (3x?) scaling was enough for anyone and took away 4x, I didn't notice because I was already set at 4x and it continued working. Somewhat later they took away the backend, and then my system crashed with no error message immediately at login. After much troubleshooting replaced a movie night, I inquired about the functionality being removed and was berated for using an undocumented/unsupported feature (because I was continuing to use it after the interface to set it had been removed, without my knowledge). I'll never use gnome again if I can help it.
- myfonj 1y agoLast time I used an Android (Galaxy) phone, to have a solid pitch-black background (which I thought made sense for modern phone displays energy-wise, besides looking pretty swell), I had to download — yes, D-O-W-N-L-O-A-D — some black image from some "Galaxy Store" thing or whatnot to achieve that. It was free, but it seemed like an exception there. Something that should be a default option, or a single-tap switch in settings, turned into a chore consisting of a period of agonising disbelief, doubt, denial, search, and eventually bitter acceptance.
- whynotmaybe 1y agoI had to take a picture with my finger on the camera to have a black image to use as background.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoI don’t know if that would do it or just return your dark current image. The best thing to do is just take a file same as your screen resolution into your favorite image editor and fill it with actual true black. Save as png and send to phone.
- myfonj 1y agoWas not sure if sensor in pitch dark would catch some other radiation and output some pixel "grain" seen from high ISO or not, but from what I tried, visually the photo seems pretty black, so the method seems to be surprisingly usable. As for "same image as your screen resolution": screenshot sounds like the exact fitting thing here. As a challenge, tried making screenshot black using stock Samsung "Gallery" and it seems that repeated Edit - Brightness: -100 - Save as copy, then open the copy and goto back to Edit can do the trick as well, after four or so copies. (Copies, because there is no way to re-apply same effect on the same photo, apparently.)
- drewolbrich 1y agoAnother way is to do a Google image search for "black".
- woolion 1y agoI checked in KDE, since I'm generally confused as to why it's not more popular now: in the wallpaper settings you choose `wallpaper type: plain color` and it gives you a color picker to set it. It also shows you the screen you set it for, and a boolean to set it for all screens at once.
- greenavocado 1y agoThose of us that use KDE don't necessarily broadcast it
- LastMuel 1y agoWhy? KDE is awesome.
- greenavocado 1y agoToo busy building
- skyyler 1y agoToo busy to discuss your preferences. Not busy enough to not discuss your being too busy to discuss your preferences on internet forums. I'm not trying to be mean here, I'm just fascinated by what people will consider to be a waste of time.
- greenavocado 1y agoEvangelizing KDE is not something I care about
- skyyler 1y agoHm. It seems like you care about it at least a little, otherwise why would this thread exist? It's okay to care about things.
- 1y ago
- RajT88 1y agoI too prefer a solid color. However, I've noticed, there's not much point in changing it. Showing the desktop is a waste of screen real estate because of the generations of abuse of desktop shortcuts. Even if you are careful, it becomes a cluttered wasteland (on Windows anyways). I just learned to never use the desktop for anything and always have windows up on various monitors.
- CRConrad 1y agoWindows 10 has a setting to allow you to choose if it should show or hide desktop icons. Dunno about 11.
- imzadi 1y agoYes, you can hide icons in windows 11 just by right clicking on the desktop and going to view > show desktop icons.
- bee_rider 1y agoI thought Windows programs generally asked if you want to make a desktop icon for them. (But I only use Windows as a video game console).
- RajT88 1y agoNot always. It's up to their installer. And the installer doesn't have to ask (it can just do it). The situation is better these days, with windows store apps. Still, I developed the habit of just never using the desktop in the XP days when things were really bad. There was a war over your eyeballs, which had shady software vendors warring over desktop space, start menu space, taskbar space, even fucking file associations. I recall for a little RealPlayer and Windows Media Player used to yank back and forth file associations each time they ran, even if you tried to make them stop.
- rpd9803 1y agoYou should view this page in Microsoft Edge for the best experience! \s
- hnlmorg 1y agoKDE works pretty well here. I set a solid colour of black on one PC which powers a projector.
- sixothree 1y agoThe number of times my solid color preference has been replaced with all black over the last 10 years is absolutely astounding. I have no understanding of why this seems to be so difficult.
- wlesieutre 1y agoAlso in macOS recently, I've set a solid color and it has reverted itself to some default forest photo several times. I suspect this is related to the System Preferences rebuild, since it's worked fine for 20+ years of OS X before that.
- layer8 1y agoI keep a single-color image around for that reason.
- tough 1y agoIt kinda seems to me this is better solved by a webapp that lets you generate any background image and download and you set it up on your OS.
- gjsman-1000 1y agoWhen you say it that way, it's actually baffling that there's still separate code paths for solid background colors. Just offer a background picker, and have it generate a 1x1 PNG, for the color selected. Just like that, you can use the image background code path for everything; and the code for generating the image almost certainly exists in the OS already. Maybe add some metadata to the generated image to filter it from the images picker, and you're done.
- tough 1y agoIt feels like a lot of these non-sense features is what you get after years of fixes and releases, it's hard to envision a full system 10 years out and get it right, and there's almost never time to clean up unless it's a greenfield project or something.
- Merad 1y agoYou know, I bought a MBP as a personal machine 6 months ago - my first Mac - and this post made me realize that I couldn't even tell you what its desktop looks like. I'm sure I saw it a few times when I was doing initial setup, but I don't remember anything about. I used to do things like set custom wallpapers, but probably around 10 years I pretty much stopped using the desktop entirely.
- ryandrake 1y agoHow do you not have a desktop? What do you see when all your applications are closed?
- wizzwizz4 1y agomacOS will re-open the programs you last had open, and reposition the windows to the same locations as before (though with dubious success at actually opening the correct files) upon restart, so it's entirely possible to have a perpetually-buried desktop that never becomes visible.
- Merad 1y agoI always have at least a web browser open, and as the other comment said MacOS reopens apps on restart.
- Telemakhos 1y agoI'm trying to reproduce the bug on macOS 15.4.1, but it lets me pick solid colors just fine, either from a list or by adding a custom color.
- js2 1y agoFixed in 15.4.1: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256028948?answerId=261329643022&sortBy=rank#261329643022 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256028948?answerId=2613... I also ran into it with 15.4.0 and worked around it by creating an image that's the solid color I like to use. It turns out that the system-supplied solid color options are themselves just 128x128 pixel PNG images too: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256028948?answerId=261331281022#261331281022 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256028948?answerId=2613...
- ryandrake 1y agoMaybe I'm still living in the 1990s, but isn't the graphics API call to paint a solid 2D rectangle infinitely faster than the call to blt a 2D image to the screen, with possible arbitrary scaling and clipping? Or is everything just natively textures now and we don't even have 2D drawing hardware?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anthk 1y agoThe second.
- MindSpunk 1y agoNo, not really. Everything is just rasterized triangles now, but whether they're textured or not is up to the shader your using. A non-textured triangle will be faster than a textured one as it can just return a literal in the pixel shader instead of wasting time sampling a texture for each pixel. However a single texture sample is so cheap on modern hardware that a specialized path for solid colors wouldn't be worth the complexity in a 2D setting. It's fast enough.
- jug 1y agoWeird. Using a custom solid color background works in my install of macOS. But I do use 15.4.1 in case the fix was just released.