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Share your favorite oldschool wallpapers!
I've been in a bit of a late 90s, early 00s aesthetic and was wondering what people's favorite oldschool wallpapers are.
I'm partial to crystal, clouds, Cheetah, carved stone, and Dapper Drake. I'm probably forgetting a bunch.
Note these don't need to be default OS wallpapers, those that reflect the aesthetic of the time are fine too.
Edit: Might as well share my current desktop.
Fluorescence[6] from digitalblasphemy.com was my wallpaper for ages.
Holy cow, I'd forgotten about this one! What a trip to see it again.
Oh wow, I'd completely forgotten about Brian. I used to visit that site a ton when I was into 3D stuff (I went to school for it).
I'm delighted to see he's still creating stuff! Though his website hasn't changed much. 🤣 Looks like he's doing VR stuff now too, I'm definitely going to have to check that out.
I've been really into vintage pixel art recently, and I've had this as my wallpaper for the past couple months now. (Actually, I have the animated Wallpaper Engine version, found here). I really love that aethstetic, and I think all of Mark Ferrari's older pixel art stuff is great for wallpapers.
This was my wallpaper for ages and ages, all through the 90's. That it was an image from 1969 may or may not say anything about me.
Nice, I dig it! Escher?
Edit: Yep.
Ah, I forgot about those Windows 95 tiled backgrounds! I remember I used to change the background like four times a day on my old computer. Here are the rest of them. The links were pretty tough. I think I mostly kept it on the clouds, though...
Suddenly I have just relived the memory of the eye strain this screensaver caused me over two decades ago.
Time for Lunch is my current background on my mid 2000's ThinkPad, it's a classic wallpaper for KDE 3. It's a tiling wallpaper, even though it's a pretty hefty 512x512, so it looks great even on high res desktops. In general, the KDE 3 (nowadays called Trinity) wallpapers are very much early 2000's aesthetic!
Is Trinity still a thing? I remember reading about it years ago but haven't heard much. Never seemed to gain the momentum MATE got.
Yeah, it's absolutely still a thing, I use it for university stuff all the time. It's definitely not as active or as widely used as MATE, but you can install it quite easily on multiple distros and it works perfectly fine. It's also super easy to customize and comes with some built in themes, which are designed to emulate Windows, OSX, older versions of KDE, etc. from the era. If you're interested in the late 90's/early 2000's desktop aesthetic, it might be worth playing around with a bit, even if it's just inside a virtual machine or such.
I just do
xsetroot -gray, which without a compositor gives me a checkered background. It's really helped me not stress about backgrounds.Mac OS 7 tiling wallpapers
IRIX Twilight live wallpaper converted to PNG