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Why some people change their wallpaper/profile picture more than others ?
Is there any psychological thing behind it. if you are a changer why do you change your picture so often ? and what do you think about people who don't change it at all ?, and if you are constant why ? and what do you think about people who change it ?
it's not that important I know, but it has been in my head for long time not. why people change their prof pic, computer/phone background so often than others ?
My profile picture hasn't changed since 2011 (edit: 2010). At this point it's part of my identity. In fact I wish tildes had avatars, even if they were only visible on the profile page, since I so strongly associate it with "me". Hi @deimos ;)
My wallpapers do change once in a while though. I like the variety. In fact I kind of like keeping a wallpaper for long enough to get used to it, and then change it to mentally have some change.
In fact you've inspired me to change my phone wallpaper since it's been a while.
Where do you get your wallpapers from?
For my phone, I generally have enough variety between OnePlus and Google's defaults. Sometimes I see something nice on instagram; for my lock screen I also sometimes put a picture of my girlfriend.
l don't think it's any deeper than "sometimes you just want to stare at something else after a while of looking at the same thing".
I've got bird pics as icons and backgrounds & l change those regularly, often when l find a slightly nicer bird pic.
Username checks out. What's your current bird of choice and can you share your background with us please? I love bird photography!
Is about evolving and changing how do you see or present yourself, you're not the same person you were 5 or even 1 year ago so why not change it, specially when an avatar can be "the first impression" of the virtual world.
This is specially true for me on discord where you can set a different username per server, for example in a D&D server I use my character's name, and in language exchange server I use something related to the language, it is also fun when people call you by a different name depending on how they met you. Obviously a name is not an avatar but in this case it's related to what you're asking.
I have a folder of over 100 desktop pictures that automatically cycle out every day (a built-in feature in macOS). Helps keep things fresh, and given the wide variety of cool images out there, there's no reason why I should have to stick with only one.
Yeah I do this but sort’ve to an extreme. I have a folder synced across my computer/laptop with a few thousand wallpapers I’ve collected over the last decade or so (a few older ones but they’re usually too low res these days) and my wallpaper is set to change to a random one every 30 minutes.
I also choose random profile pics and usernames for most sites, and change both regularly as well as delete accounts lots and make new ones.
I like variety. I reorganise my house lots, customise and paint/decorate lots of my belongings, move house lots (even to the state/country level), and like to travel lots.
The short answer for changers is often dopamine.
All my wallpapers are just solid black. Have been for years. I don’t need the distraction.
I keep my profile picture mostly the same nowadays. Not sure when I made the change or why, but I like to just pick something sufficiently funny/weird and stick with it. Some sort of psychological shift occurred.
As for my background, that's where I tend to get more easily bored. I set up a folder with pics of interesting tank or plane models from War Thunder, and I get a new one every 10 minutes. Last one was the Landsverk Lago I, and now it's the Landsverk U-SH 405. Think of a bigger version of that mouse droid from Star Wars, with twin rocket launchers on the roof.
I constantly change my profile picture, my internet handle, my hair, and my facial hair. I also used to be notorious for doing this with my email.
The reason: I simply get bored of what I have.
I may have commitment issues...
I'm pretty much a constant when it comes to profile pictures.
One reason is that there just aren't many good pictures of me. I don't take selfies, and my friends aren't the kind of people who take a lot of pictures. My Facebook profile picture has been the same for more than a decade now, since my dad snapped a good photo of me when we were vacationing on Iceland together. (There's another reason why I don't change my profile picture (or wallpaper) on Facebook: I haven't found a way to do so without the change showing on my wall and in my contacts' feed.)
Another reason is I care less than I probably should. My Microsoft profile picture is probably the best example of this. When I signed up for MSN Messenger nearly two decades ago I was randomly assigned one of the default profile pictures, of two horses enjoying a sunny day together. Without any input from me, that picture somehow became my Hotmail account profile picture, later my Skype profile picture, and eventually my Microsoft account profile picture, and thus my Windows user profile picture. So now whenever I sign in on my Windows computer I see that nearly two decades old low-resolution picture of two horses. No-one's ever questioned it, I've found no compelling reason to change it, and the slight amusement it brings me is reason enough to keep it.
I change my Steam profile picture comparatively often, having changed it twice since I created the account around fifteen years ago. The one I currently use is based on a nickname I had in college. Again there's no compelling reason to change it, and the slight amusement it brings me is a reason to keep it.
My desktop wallpaper is usually the system default. I only see it for about 10 seconds whenever I reboot my computer, so there's not much reason to change it, unless the system default is very bad. The exception here is my work computer. Young me used to change the desktop wallpaper quite often, and I discovered that Windows 7 had a folder of delightful rather abstract ones. So I put that folder on cycle, and when I was upgraded to Windows 10 at work, I copied that folder to keep them on cycle. I mean look at them, aren't they just wonderful? They've been my work-computer wallpapers for more than a decade now, ever since college.
I do change my phone wallpaper quite often though, every few months, since that's one I actually see many times a day, and do sometimes tire of. My current one is the cover art for Haken's latest album. It's pretty cool, but I'll probably tire of it and change it soon, maybe even before the end of the year.
No opinion really. You be you, change it as often as you like. I won't click like on it in my Facebook feed though, I reserve my likes for more important content.
It's weird I've had the same phone wallpaper for 5-6 years(?), specifically searching for a higher res version when switching phones, but I change my laptop background every 5-6 months, sometimes recycling old images. Not sure why, I guess my phone screen holds all my icons and so I don't want to be distracted by the background, but I keep my pc desktop clear of all icons, again in a bid to reduce distraction and a new image is a useful break, like walking in a new room, or starting a new year, a signifier of things being different now.
For my desktop, I have a folder full of image files, and I set up KDE to cycle through them randomly, a new image every 8 hours. Mostly I think it's because none of them are particularly a favourite; I like them all, so I'm pleased to see any of them on any given day. I don't think anything negative about people that just have a single image showing all the time. It's personal preference.
I usually just leave it at OS default, to be honest.
If I need to get a little extra performance oomph, I change to solid black.
Don't mean to be too rude or dismissive, but given the power of today's computers, I doubt wallpapers really affect performance. They've just a grid of pixels, and they were available on computers 20 years ago, which were magnitudes less powerful than those today.
At any given time, your computer is probably displaying at least five images (albeit ones that are smaller): icons (both for files and buttons), website graphics, toolbar textures, etc. One more doesn't really change much. And modern UIs have more computationally intensive tasks also: window drop shadows, compositing, etc. What you've feeling is probably just the placebo effect.
Don't mean to be too rude or dismissive, but given the propensity of today's programmers to overcomplicate things, I doubt that displaying a wallpaper is as simple as drawing a grid of pixels on screen like 20 years ago, but more like instantiating an instance of DesktopBackgroundObject, which instantiates ImageDisplayObject, which loads FileByteArrayObject into ByteArrayImageParserObject, and so on, which gobbles up a no-trivial amount of my precious RAM, which I'd much rather use for other purposes.
As I mentioned, it is not the case on all desktops, but certainly the case on many I have experienced. What you're feeling is probably placebo effect.
(Different person than above)
I don't know that you would really be changing anything though. For example, on OSX, the "solid color" backgrounds are 128x128 jpgs iirc, and they're initialized and tiled like any other picture is, which includes any safety handlers and stuff. The initialization process is also likely only run once; once a jpg or png has been decoded, I'm almost certain that it's stored as a pixmap and simply drawn first before the other windows are drawn on top (that's how Linux traditionally does it). Even if it's stored as a completely uncompressed 24bit RGB pixmap, assuming your monitor is a standard 1920x1080 display, that comes out to about 50MB worth of data. Assuming your computer has 8GB of RAM, you're only losing 0.625% of RAM vs if you could somehow completely disable any form of background rendering.
If you have an older computer, the difference can be quite a bit bigger - an 800x600x24 bit buffer would be about 11MB, on a 256MB system, that's a 4.5% loss - but I don't know if there's much you could do with an extra 5% of RAM you couldn't do with less. Especially if the OS unloads the background layer when memory gets tight, I know Android does this since my Epic 4G often reloads the wallpaper when quitting the more memory intensive apps.
I've not owned a computer with 8GB of RAM yet.
0.625% here and 0.625% there adds up.
4.5% of RAM is a huge fucking chunk, and I think it's rather arrogant to say that there isn't much I could do with that. I have plenty of better uses for that RAM, thank you very much.
Use your RAM however the fuck you want, and leave your judgements away from my RAM.
Next thing you'll be telling me it doesn't matter your page doesn't render without JS, since 95% of users browse with JS enabled, and the other 5% need to get a better computer.
Eh man, I'm not judging here. You're welcome to use whatever you like, different strokes for different folks right? And if you really do have an old computer and you feel like it makes a difference, then by all means. I'm genuinely just not really sure of an application where it would work fine with 512MB free, but wouldn't work with 501MB free, for example. I have a ThinkPad from 2007 with only 3GB (used to be 2), but I can't recall a single time where I could've ever stopped it from swapping to disk if I didn't have a background picture, vs if I did. The applications that do it, like a modern version of Firefox or LibreOffice, take up way too much to care about a single digit number increase, and it doesn't even come close to filling up otherwise, you really don't need 3GB for running a basic TDE desktop and your typical productivity stuff like an email client, music player, text editor, some widgets, etc.
If it were that near the margins, you can typically tweak your swappiness value and make it more conservative for example, which will effectively free up a little more space without changing anything about the user experience. I love old hardware and I'm not judging you for using it at all, just a little sketch on a situation where such a small change would give any noticeable extra performance. If you've encountered one though, I'm all up for hearing about it, and how you discovered it?
I've removed both LibreOffice and Firefox from my last couple of installs. Sadly, both of those are long past their usefulness to bloat peak ratio, and are not worth using to me anymore.
I think you might have missed the following parts of my admittedly terse message, so here is a more long-winded version, which you seem to prefer:
It's not just the image which is in memory, but all the object required to load it. This is different on every system. Also, if I have 5 workspaces, I would bet it more likely that there are five copies of the image in my RAM.
The desktop wallpaper is also one of the many wastes of RAM in a typical default distro, and only the beginning if you want to trim.
I think I first noticed this effect while still using Windows, either 2K or 9x, and watching the desktop take seconds of swapping to repaint, whereas a solid color would paint instantly. And yes, this was without Active Desktop.
I need every drop of RAM I can squeeze out of this baby, because I'm using IntelliJ and browsing the Web in a relatively efficient browser with many tabs open.
It kind of varies. I used to change my backgrounds pretty frequently, but these days I find myself a lot more reserved about doing it. I'm generally very pro-customization and I like to make all of my devices / accounts / anything I control different from the default, like it's my way of stamping my identity on it. But I think I've gotten so used to my customizations now, that the idea of changing them just feels kinda weird. If I had an analogy, it's kind of like a bedroom - I have my special picture frames and plants and mementos, but once I've set it up, it seems like it's meant to be that way.
I stopped changing my wallpapers when my main home computer became a 5k iMac.
Basically nobody makes wallpapers with that as a native resolution and the rare ones you find look like awful clown vomit with the color saturation turned way too high.
I don't care much about avatars so I don't usually change them.
For wallpapers, I used to change them out a lot in high school, and I think it had to do with some sort of impulse control, since I didn't know how to focus clearly at the time, I randomly let myself focus on the wallpaper since it was something always in view and taking my attention.
Now I change it every once in a while (few months) when I feel like my way of living is changing. I'm still particular about having interesting, yet not attention grabbing images, usually mountains or forests in with consistent blue or green tones.
I very rarely change my wallpaper on my phone (plain solid black), my laptop (plain solid grey), my work laptop (plain solid purple), or my desktop (basically this) - I've never felt the need to as I spend basically 0 time actually looking at them.
Profile pictures I don't bother changing much either, primarily because I like having them consistent across platforms, and there are so many places to update it that it's tiresome to try to do them all, uploading the same photo to every web service. There's also the fact that I don't tend to have too many photos of just me, particularly not ones that I actually like, so it takes a while before I find a photo that I think "there, I want that to represent me!"
My avatar has been Cool Guy from "Cool guy has chill day" for the last ~7 years and I can't remember why. My computer backgrounds are usually neon minimalist art I'll randomly pick up from around the net while browsing and my phone background is usually fan-made content from my favorite games.
I've kept my phone the same for ~4 years now and my PC the same for about 2 mostly because I'm picky and don't see things that catch my eye and make me think "THIS MUST BE MY NEW BACKGROUND/PFP" that often.
My avatar (as Cycloneblaze) is sort of a brand of mine, since this handle is not (supposed to be) attached to any real-world identity. So, I only change it if I can improve it. This happens reasonably often though, as my preference for what looks best as an avatar changes a bit.
For other images, like my wallpapers, or profile pictures elsewhere that probably include my face, I change them after I've had the old one for long enough to come across a new image that I like enough to change it to. I don't think this is particularly deep.