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Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
Hi HN, in my last vacation, I built desktopcolors.com as a place to collect iconic solid background colors. Let me know what you think.
- _joel 1mo agoIt's strange how seeing the default NT4 and 2k colours take me straight back to a fresh install 25+ years ago. First job was doing desktop rollouts so I'd see it a lot!
- wewewedxfgdf 1mo agoI still love the Amiga colors.
- vlowrian 1mo agoMe too! The Workbench Blue is actually my current desktop background :)
- vivid242 1mo agoI sometimes catch myself recreating the Win95 color on my Mac. Thanks for this!
- danirod 1mo agoOne nerdy detail about old operating systems and graphics cards: due to the way the VGA color palette works, the teal background used in Windows 98 and earlier versions of Windows was actually lighter than #008080 if the computer was configured to use 16 colors (not 256 colors): https://twitter.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/1626298460373671938 https://twitter.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/162629846037367193... https://xcancel.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/1626298460373671938 https://xcancel.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/162629846037367193... Another nerdy detail: the default background color on Windows XP was different depending on whether the theme was Luna or Classic. On Classic it is the same one as Windows 2000, but for Luna it is more blueish. I understand the denial, but it will be the 25st anniversary of the XP release in a few months, so it probably qualifies as classic by now.
- vlowrian 1mo agoThat's cool, thanks for sharing. I like the idea of adding XP as an anniversary gift ;)
- millerm 1mo agoI remember that good feeling when getting a new windows 9x machine up and running or installing a new video card, updating the graphics driver to get the display into 16M colors, and enjoying the darker teal. The color itself felt like an upgrade. When that brighter teal appeared you knew you didn't have the driver set, even before seeing any icons. Man, I wish I could have the 90s back. I absolutely despise where we went with tech in the past decade. I suppose that's a me problem.
- d3Xt3r 1mo agoI'm with you, the 90s were cool, especially early computing days when things were equally quirky and equally magical. On that graphics drivers note, I recall some video drivers were just so bad back then you might not get the full colors or resolution depending on your setup. Or some games might just look weird. But there was a cool thirdparty driver called UniVBE from SciTech[1] that you could install for almost any card and suddenly everything looked and worked so much more better, it was like magic. It was one of the go-to utilities I'd always carry around with me in my bag of floppy disks, full of unique, wonderous tools that the world has probably forgotten by now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE
- accrual 1mo agoI always liked the feeling of getting a proper video driver installed and unlocking "true color" support, the desktop background and icons were suddenly much richer and saturated.
- keito 1mo agoThe top-right (16 color) version gives me a "safe mode" tingly sensation :) I didn't know about the Luna/Classic distinction - I guess you don't usually see the Luna color since it's hidden behind Bliss.
- flowercalled 1mo agoI can understand using an llm to build your website. But I can't understand using it to write copy, especially when it's so unnecessary here.
- rideontime 1mo agoSeconded. The "personality" it tries to add is trite and tiresome and everybody immediately sees it for what it is, especially for a case like this where there's only so many ways to say "this is the default desktop color of an operating system." Not only that, but it's confusing - is "Windows Classic blue" a real thing, or just an attempt at a cute phrase? Just label the colors and be done with it.
- vlowrian 1mo agoIt's actually not so easy to pick a speaking name for each color, since many colors are used in different OSs. I tried to use neutral and standard color names were they exist. Things like Windows Classic blue are probably always description-slop, though. Another user suggested to use media quotes etc. on OSs, which I think is actually a pretty good idea. I might swap the LLM generated placeholders for something like that.
- echoangle 1mo agoWhy do you even need the text? Just show the color, year and the name of the OS.
- vlowrian 1mo agoIn many cases, there is some additional information I want to add, like which themes the colors were used as background color in, or which palette they come from if there are several different. I also discovered a lot about the different OSs while researching the colors and I think it's a nice nod towards the museum character of the site to add fun/nerd facts when I stumble upon them. But true, in many cases there is no need for text - I just removed the tagline which didn't add anything useful.
- newsomix9xl 1mo agoWhere's plan9?
- rzzzt 1mo agoExactly!
- rcarmo 1mo agoDelightful, even if I don’t recall Solaris
- zebproj 1mo agoThere's no "Hot Dog Stand", so the collection is incomplete.
- vlowrian 1mo agoThere is :) https://desktopcolors.com/os/windows-3-1/ffff00 https://desktopcolors.com/os/windows-3-1/ffff00
- lucideer 1mo agoWindows 2008 is the teal desktop I remember fondly - they brought it back after going blue in Windows 2003. I'm presuming it was the same #008080 shade as '95 & '98.
- iAMkenough 1mo agoOS X Aqua Blue!
- torh 1mo agoMy favorite was the blue in Windows 2000. Never cared much for the green in Windows 95/98. When installing Windows 98 later (because games) I would try to set up the same blue. Instead of getting it correct, I guessed, and ended up with #336699 which was easy to remember and "close enough". I see now that it's closer to Haiku (almost perfect, #336698) than Windows 2000.
- cosmic_cheese 1mo agoSame. The lighter gray 2000 uses compared to 9x is also much more pleasant. It might sound ridiculous but using 9x with the default theme felt a bit depressing. It conjures images of being stuck in a building with that awful fluorescent overhead lighting on a day where it’s dark and dreary outside. 2000 on the other hand is about as refreshing as a gray 3D beveled OS theme can look, on par with Mac OS platinum and maybe slightly edged out by the bright colorful sunny tab titlebars of BeOS.
- queenkjuul 1mo agoWindows 2000 is the epitome of Windows UI to me, probably because my first PC had Me which borrowed the desktop from it. As i kid I didn't even notice it was different from the 98 machines at school, but when i set up 98SE for retro gaming as an adult I couldn't shake this "something isn't quite how i remember" feeling. Then i set up 2000 as a server for the retro machines and everything clicked. Kind of amazing how many control panels in Windows 10 and 11 are essentially unchanged from 2000
- t0mas88 1mo agoI agree, the color was great, and also in general Windows 2000 was very good. I used both the desktop and server versions for years. After that Windows XP made me switch to Linux. Since then I've only really used Debian and Mac OS. I recently tried installing Windows 11 on a PC to run some games. The contrast with Windows 2000 is crazy, what a mess. Even just the control panel has three different UI frameworks mixed in one application. The whole thing is slow on a modern CPU with 64gb ram. How did they get from Windows 2000 which arguably may have been ahead of Linux in terms of kernel and at least on par if not better than Mac OS in terms of UX to todays version of Windows 11?
- imfemambocus 1mo agoThe one thing I would add to each swatch is where the number came from. A value read out of a palette table and a value sampled from a screenshot are not the same number, and the difference is invisible. I ran into this today on something unrelated. A page painted #0b0d14, and macOS screencapture wrote rgb(8,13,16) into the file, because the capture lands in the display's colour space rather than sRGB. Handing that same hex to a video encoder gave a third answer, rgb(9,11,17), this time from the yuv conversion. I had to ask for #0a0f13 to get back the value the page had actually painted. So any swatch sampled from a screenshot of a running install is drifted by a few levels, silently, and a CRT is a further step away again. One line per entry saying "documented VGA palette" or "sampled from a VM" would make this citable rather than just lovely to scroll, and it would settle the Windows 98 teal question in the sibling comment.
- Someone 1mo agoThe Mac also ran with a different gamma correction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction#Computer_displays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction#Computer_disp...: “In most computer display systems, images are encoded with a gamma of about 0.45 and decoded with the reciprocal gamma of 2.2. A notable exception, until the release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in September 2009, were Macintosh computers, which encoded with a gamma of 0.55 and decoded with a gamma of 1.8”
- yourself_q 29d ago[flagged]
- tuzemec 1mo agoFor the past 20+ years I'm using the same desktop color across various OSes: #000000 This is one of the first things that I modify on a fresh install.
- HelloUsername 1mo agoFunny thing: "Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color" 28.jan.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856262 117 comments "Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?" 28.apr.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827214 296 comments
- cryo32 1mo agoThis is great. I've been meaning to work out what windows NT background colour is for years. My desktop now is solid that :)
- drybjed 1mo agoFirst I looked for was Atari 1040 STE TOS green background, and it's not there. Bummer.
- voodooEntity 1mo agoNo os² feel like this list should have gotten more entries and love before publishing
- scrumper 1mo agoHuh, I do not remember Windows 1.0 being that shade of green but screenshots confirm what's here.
- Narishma 1mo agoIt probably looked much less neon bright on the displays of the time. Same for Windows 2.0.
- pavon 1mo agoInterestingly, none of the screenshots I can find show the dithering that the article talks about, and all the contemporary photographs of monitors show a less green blue background. I think maybe something is being lost in emulation?
- vlowrian 1mo agoAFAIK, the actual color was highly dependent on the hardware used (e.g. video adapter, CRT, etc.). That's why photographs of a Windows 1.0 screen might look vastly different. The color I listed is what Windows outputs on the software side. It's pretty much an EGA dither of bright cyan and bright green. It's what you would get with todays hardware.
- summermusic 1mo agoWhen I was just getting into Linux and trying out all the random window managers, I found that I really liked the hues of green and purple that Blackbox came with.
- vlowrian 1mo agoI agree, Blackbox is still one of the WMs on my wishlist.
- summermusic 1mo agoUpdate: I went into the source code and found the colors I was fond of. I didn't care for the red but I'm including it for completeness Grey: #aaaaaa Green: #77aa77 Purple: #9077aa Blue: #7790aa Red: #aa5555 Source: https://github.com/bradleythughes/blackbox/tree/master/data/styles https://github.com/bradleythughes/blackbox/tree/master/data/...
- vlowrian 1mo agoAdded, along with all other styles featuring solid color backgrounds :) https://desktopcolors.com/os/blackbox https://desktopcolors.com/os/blackbox
- colinhb 1mo agoSome overlooked iconic backgrounds/color-schemes for me: NeXTSTEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_... Plan9/Rio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/media/File:Plan_9_Fourth_Edition_rio_interaction_screenshot.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/media/F...
- mickeyp 1mo agoI always loved that purple/slate blue colour of WindowMaker/GNUStep/NeXTSTEP.
- vlowrian 1mo agoNoted. Plan9/Rio was actually on my list for the initial release, but it is currently broken in the Virtual OS Museum (https://virtualosmuseum.org/ https://virtualosmuseum.org/) and I couldn't find any other reliable sources. But it's still on the todo list and I've also added NeXTSTEP.
- consumer451 1mo agoThis isn't a "desktop," but C64's dark blue background appears to be #403285. That was the color of my very early childhood.
- vlowrian 21d agoI just added the C64, based on pepto's colodore palette: https://desktopcolors.com/os/commodore-64 https://desktopcolors.com/os/commodore-64.
- VCFundedGenYer 1mo agoThe descriptions under the colors are very obviously LLM generated and make little sense. No human would make statements like what is written under each entry. Contains many LLM-isms like em-dashes, loaded words, and load-bearing phrases (emphasis intended). Consider removing or rewriting those bits.
- nobrains 1mo agoDOS #000000
- ocdjeremy 1mo agoIt's often said that scent is tightly associated with memory, but simply looking at these colors sends me on multiple trips down memory lane. I second the post from imfemambocus on color-sampling provenance. It would be useful to know the exact source for each.
- stronglikedan 1mo agoBleskOS's color seems... offensive. Perhaps they don't want people living on their desktop.
- queenkjuul 1mo agoI like the colors but I'm personally getting very sick of every single website using That One Font Claude Likes for everything. I think the mono is IBM Plex? Idk what the other one is, but I'll be looking it up so as to be certain i never use it in my projects lol
- RattlesnakeJake 1mo agoI can't even describe how many spots this hit for me.
- russellbeattie 1mo agoI was pretty surprised at how I both immediately recognized each desktop color, but also how each of them "felt". I could picture the icons and menus in my mind, and their location (left, right, top, bottom) and knew how the mouse would respond as well. I suspect there's some sort of strong association going on with color and tool use in our monkey brains.
- h2aichat 1mo agoI feel old when I realize that I have used most of them!
- timbit42 1mo agoWhere are the 8-bit systems? Not all of them were black.
- johng 1mo agoSolaris 9 and Haiku OS are the tops.
- kjellsbells 1mo agolove it. Would love to see the grey/orange/blue/dark pink of CDE from the late 90s. But I'd especially love the gray on mottled gray of 1995 vintage Sun OpenWindows!
- vlowrian 1mo agoOh wow, I never used OpenWindows and I just googled it. I definitely need that in the collection! Noted :)
- dmitrygr 1mo ago45 110 145 My desktop color since win2k until today
- cdieck88 1mo agoWow, cool idea! Where did you get all the information from? Did you pick the color schemes by analyzing all the images you found on the web?
- vlowrian 1mo agoThanks! I didn't use any screenshots as sources, because I a) wanted to scrape all possible options, b) want to make sure the default is really what you would get after a fresh install and c) was afraid that a screenshot might introduce some kind of color drift, compared to the original value the OS defines. I mostly used things like the fantastic Virtual OS Museum (https://virtualosmuseum.org/ https://virtualosmuseum.org/), run-in-browser VMs like PCJs Machines (https://www.pcjs.org/blog/2015/09/21/ https://www.pcjs.org/blog/2015/09/21/) or real installations inside a VM. I tried to avoid using Color Pickers etc. and read the actual value from the OS somehow (e.g. copy the HEX value shown in the UI), but in some cases, I had to go with the macOS Digital Colour Meter (set to sRGB).
- d3Xt3r 1mo agoYou forgot the most iconic backgroud: #000000, MS DOS.
- pfeher 29d agoNice one, travelled back in time a bit. One thing that was unexpected for me is when you hover on the circles in the Known Uses section of a color, I expeceted that the given OS will be shown as a tooltip (maybe also clickable) and I don't need to click on the "View all X palettes" link. But lovely idea, thanks for sharing.
- vlowrian 29d agoAh, I can see! The dots mark years (not OSs) since multiple OSs might use the same color in the same release year. However, you're totally right: the tooltip is dearly missing since it would make just that obvious - and also a default action when clicking a dot.
- senseiPado 28d agonice
- cunjieliu 27d agosomething like： https://stylespark.dev/ https://stylespark.dev/