44
votes
What's your current PC wallpaper?
Do you change them out often? Or do you set up a rotating gallery?
Right now, I've gone back to this photograph of assorted food cubes that I came across in my uni days.
Do you change them out often? Or do you set up a rotating gallery?
Right now, I've gone back to this photograph of assorted food cubes that I came across in my uni days.
A picture I took from a recent trip: https://i.imgur.com/aDJQfi6.jpeg
Fantastic desktop wallpaper.
Beautiful, is that New Zealand?
British Columbia. Near Top of the World Provincial Park.
Hell yeah, the Kootenays are the coolest place on earth in my opinion. Anytime i go i expect to be abducted by aliens because it just feels surreal.
You might hate this answer, but it's just a dark grey color. At work there are multiple remote desktops that I use and I literally use a solid color with text written on it saying which desktop it is.
Very boring but I might have a pile of icons all over my desktop.
Ha, mine too.
Heh, no. I also do the same for my work computer, but I've always customized my personal one.
Dark gray?! What a heathen. Pure black, no exceptions!
/s just in case
Full #00000 or else.
Mine cycles every half hour, but at this exact moment it is a picture of my friend's parent's pet donkey, Tulip, in a field of bluebonnets that I added a caption to.
Apologies in advance for the long post, this is something I’m a huge nerd about.
I was brought up largely on Macs, where freely placed, odd-sized, overlapping windows are the norm, which puts a greater emphasis on desktop styling than on other platforms because significant chunks of desktop are almost always visible. In fact Windows-style environments that are designed around the screen being full of maximized or tiled windows feel kind of stifling to me, like a cubical farm with flourescent lighting, due to little to no wallpaper visibility.
To add to this, I was heavily into the desktop customization scene back in the 2000s, in which wallpapers (“desktop pictures” in old mac vernacular) played a central role.
Between these two factors I’ve been collecting wallpapers for a long time now. The earliest entries date back to 2006, with images sized to match the 1680x1050 display of the 20” iMac I had been using at the time. I’ve always been a strictler for quality (no crunchy JPEGs allowed) so most of the collection still looks good on modern displays so long as their resolution is appropriate (no blurry system interpolated scaling allowed either).
I cycle through sets of images, one for each virtual desktop on both displays. The images that’ve become my “comfy t-shirt” go-to’s generally have the following qualities:
Some of this is no doubt informed by trends in desktop UIs. I used to use more strongly bright or dark images back when OSes had no “dark mode” but featured UI themes that were heavy on midtones as opposed to the stark whites now associated with light mode.
Some samples pulled from my collection, representative of the ones I’ve been using lately:
[Wave] [Mushroom Bokeh] [Green Mountain]
[Hakone] [Misty Morning Forest] [Cobblestone Street]
[Desert Van Sunset] [Wizard, Cat, and Great Tree] [Forgotten Windmill]
That cobble stone street one looks nice. Gonna download that and give it a try.
All but three of these are in my rotation also (the purple cartoony mystery van one having been added just now - thanks). Excellent taste my friend.
Plain black. Almost don't see the desktop, so it doesn't matter much. (I used to leave macOS' default videos, but stopped since noticing they write and read a ton of data on the disk.)
My work laptop is currently black, too, because the typical branded wallpaper seems to have glitched away during some update. I'm taking it as a happy accident, and hoping it lasts. I find the company colours a bit much (not that I stare at my desktop that often).
The Ubuntu default wallpaper, I rarely see the desktop so I've given up on my old galleries of images.
This is where I'm at too. When I was a kid, I was always changing it, but I can't remember the last time I deliberately changed the wallpaper outside of changing the theme to a dark theme.
I never look at my desktop unless I'm working on a project and putting active folders and files on it. Even then, there's multiple windows up, so most of it is covered.
Same boat. I only see my desktop wallpaper when i reboot or make a new workspace.
That happened to me when I opted for i3.
I still have something, but I usually just ignore it.
A picture of my wife, my dog, and my son reading a book together, as it has been for the past several years.
Several years? Must be a huge book then, teehee
On my Desktop, it's currently a wallpaper of the painting, Nighthawks. On my Laptop, it's a rotation of Gen 1 Pokémon from here, https://pokewalls.wordpress.com/download-archive/
One of the OS defaults. It’ll end up behind 15+ layers of stacked application windows within an hour and I won’t see it for months at a time, so for me it’s not worth more than the 20 seconds of effort to pick one from the gallery.
Currently a photo of a lunar eclipse by James McCarthy, borrowed from reddit.
Before that several paintings by Phyllis Shafer, slightly cropped when necessary.
And my login wallpaper features an unfocussed Beaker. 🙂
Those painings looks good.
Yes, I really like her style, too. She got this flowing, vibrant, soft view of nature, trippy but calming.
Yes, giving me melancholic feeling not in a bad way
I grew up during the DOS gaming era. I love using pixel art from those games as desktop wallpapers. The standard resolution is usually 320x200 pixels, which can be beautifully upscaled to higher resolution displays using nearest neighbor scaling (e.g., 1920x1200 pixels). I just center fit and crop off a bit from the top and bottom.
Currently using this one from the sci-fi shooter Overkill (1992):
https://imgur.com/a/zB32PxB
I’ve never played any games from that era (born in the tail end of the 80s, nothing resembling a computer in the house till the late-mid-90s), but the art from them I come across posted on the web is so striking and moody. Those artists were amazing at working within platform constraints.
I have the same wallpaper for years, I always choose nature, on my phone I have a slightly different one.
The moment I try to change it, something always bothers me, I like to use the desktop as a working area.
I collect Moebius art. Right now I just have one though:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Moebius/comments/1mjwi4t/this_looks_incredibly_striking_on_the_glowing/
Haha, holy shit I have this exact wallpaper right now. Might be from the same source, too, because it's frustratingly difficult to find scans of Moebius art that are high-res enough to use as a wallpaper.
https://www.deviantart.com/fire-time/art/Alive-184850190
I made a daftpunk alive wallpaper back in 2010 and it's managed to stick with me since then. I was really into rain meter back then and had a dynamic version that would tell time time.
Lesser Yellowlegs :)
Specifically the cover photo from this Audubon article – I'm a sucker for shorebirds being reflected in water
m31phat.png
I've had heic1502a on my desktop since they published it. I switched to PHAT briefly when they published that, but with 10 years of being accustomed to the core off-center I switched back for familiarity.
On my laptop for some time now I've had a processed image from Juno "Perijove 8" (Flickr archive link).
For a long time on my work machine I've just had a black screen, but fairly recently I switched to a Cassini image of Saturn's moon Daphnis PIA11571. I have it centered on the screen on black background (although I removed a single star from the background. Here's the actual image file).
I am sensing a distinct lack of bliss in these answers.
There's a fun video where the original photographer talks about taking the photo and selling it to Microsoft. I think it's this one but don't have time to watch the whole thing to verify: https://youtube.com/watch?v=N_rildi0Izs
I have had a rotating gallery for years that I add and remove pictures from as I feel like. It's got a lot of space pictures, sci-fi ships, animals, and generally silly nerdy stuff.
This is me. Every few months I go to wallhaven and browse around for stuff then chuck it in the gallery folder. When I start seeing pictures that do nothing for me I'll go trim the folder down.
Mostly my pictures are what you mentioned and a lot of game stuff in there too depending what I can find. At work I have a few gaming landscape shots so it's kinda game but still work neutral.
There used to be a website called Desktoppr that had an endless scroll and a dropbox integration, so I could use the app folder as the backgrounds folder and have it sync them into it automatically. Since it went belly up, I haven't really found a place that's geared toward endless mode browsing and isn't covered with ads. I'll have to give wallhaven a go.
Wallhaven (and before it, its spiritual ancestor Wallbase) has been excellent for my usage. Quality is consistently high and it has a built in tool that finds higher resolution variants if they exist.
I haven't found a good wallpaper site like wallhaven for straight ease of browsing. I'm always running ad block so not sure if ad free. Generally I just set to my desktop resolution and sort by toplists, if I see a game I like or something I'll search in its hashtag sometimes. The images just go right into standard windows folder and I point windows at the folder.
I tried wallpaper engine a while back but I feel like I had some issues where I might have pulled down something that messed my pc up and didn't want to deal with learning the ins and outs to deal with it. I've been very happy with resolution matched images that rotate every now and then
That reminded me that for a while we had an app on our Roku that pulled the Bing Image of the Day and rotated the past so many through in a slideshow. That was really nice for the TV, though I'm Not sure they would all make good desktop backgrounds
I haven't changed mine in 7+ years, at all.
It's just a minimalistic image with a solid black background + a single line of white text. I use it both on my phone and on my PC.
It's always a vista. Often it's a landscape photo I photographed or created (panoramic). Sometimes it's a screenshot I took from a game, such as right now (can you tell which game this is from?). Rarely it's art released as a wallpaper.
Nice screenshot. I'm guessing Death Stranding
Incorrect! But it's not an old game for sure.
KCD, maybe 2? Reminds me of 1 but I haven't gotten into 2 yet.
Very good guess, but no! Wrong time period!
Then I likely haven't played it. I didn't completely agree with the Death Stranding guess, but I had actually played that one!
Wrong color for Horizon; looks a bit like Myst or Riven.
Hm, any hints?
It's a puzzle solving game! (but not Myst or Riven)
Complete shot in the dark, but is it the Talos Principle?
I'll take it! It's The Talos Principle 2! East 3, I think?
@velosol @trim @Asinine
TALOS!
Ahh, one I never got into! I believe I have a free copy on Epic (which I never bother with these days) -- nope just checked it's on Steam and I still haven't touched it. Looks Myst-esque though, which I did get somewhat bored of the few chances I was able to play it as a kid.
But maybe I'll check it out, just based on wallpaper values!
It's really not. There's a whole philosophical component and mystery apart from the gameplay, but most of the actual puzzles are very straightforward affairs about moving parts around in a 3D environment (sometimes it's possible to "break" the intended solution if you're clever about using the 3D space).
Aha! What fun, I'm still working on Talos 1; is there a big draw for 2 beyond wanting more of the same?
I saw a review of Stone Simulator (which is clearly in the same genre as Rock Simulator) and it made me realize I hadn't been back on Tildes to submit it as a guess.
Mechanically it's more of the same, though I'd say Talos 2 is just a better game, featuring among other things:
Talos 2 does not feature things that are specific to the context of Talos 1, mainly narrative-related (I don't want to be too explicit since you're still working on it and I don't want to ruin any plot twists). The philosophical challenges of Talos 2 are their own thing. Do they have the same wow factor and originality of Talos 1? Probably not, but it wouldn't make sense to just reuse the same gimmick!
And last I knew Talos 2 was not available for VR, but Talos 1 is.
Right now it's Phosphophyllite from Land of the Lustrous. I usually change my wallpaper like once or twice a year
The rare Land of the Lustrous mention that only appears once every 10,000 years
I've got the one used on this screenshot (not my image, just found it on the internet, writing this from phone), it is default MATE desktop environment wallpaper of some era that just stuck with me forever.
I either use my computer - thus not seeing the wallpaper - or I have it locked down - thus DPMS has my monitor shut down (sleep mode, black). This is why I don't really care what is my wallpaper.
My wife always asks me why I don't have her as a wallpaper on my phone - the same reason. I don't see the wallpaper because I either do something or have the phone in sleep mode.
One of my Dungeons & Dragons characters I painted last year.
I don't see my desktop often, as my webbrowser is my go-to application on an idle screen, but when I do I appreciate looking at something simple.
Current Windows desktop background is this still from Frieren MyAnimeList Link.
I keep my desktop icon-free and use Rainmeter to put a big clock on it, usually visible on my second monitor. Also has a visualizer hidden that pops up behind the people (I have them cut-out and stuck on top of it in Rainmeter), but I don’t play music on my computer that often so it’s rarely visible. (If anyone is interested what that looks like, comment and I’ll try to remember to grab a screenshot tonight when I’m back home).
My lock screen is a photo from my wedding (just a pic of the venue greenhouse).
My work computer backgrounds is the default one from the latest update, some snowy town picture.
Mine is currently this dropout.tv promotional art for my PC and my laptop has Cthulhusaurus Rex right now, though I change that with some frequency, and this one, while a favourite, will not survive super long because I prefer darker backgrounds.
Edit: I just remembered that I can actually solve the dark background issue; now it's the negative of that image, and I'll probably adjust it again.
I also used to have a background that said "no pants is the best pants" but I lost it a while ago.
Over on /r/anime someone regularly makes minimalist wallpapers of various anime and I have a collection of mecha ones from her that rotate daily. The current one is the RX-0 Unicorn Gundam.
These are so cool! And there are lots of them!
Aura from Frieren by fen bang laoda.
Different pictures depending on the computer. Family photos on some, my car on another, black background (work laptop), phone background and lock screen are family, random pretty landscapes I've taken on an auto rotate for my creative laptop.
Basically, all my own works.
On my gaming laptop it's whatever boring default wallpaper Windows comes with. But on my work laptop it's this photo I took a few weeks ago at a local park up in the mountains. I'm no photographer, and that's not even the best vantage point in the area to get a view of the valley, but it's at my kids' favorite park so I'm there a lot :)
Currently a slideshow of images from the defunct interfacelift website. Someone on reddit shared their collection.
Here it is (Steam Workshop link). This came to be because a member of a game community I'm in asked for a specific scene to be animated in Wallpaper Engine, and I'd never done that before so I made it for them. Then was proud enough of the result to make it my wallpaper, too. Before that, I just used a photo I took of the Seattle skyline
I use one of the defaults that Fedora KDE has (Altai, which is a geometric art of mountains and a lake). Back when I was running Windows I tended to gravitate towards old hand drawn maps that I would modify in photoshop to have a dark background with white line work.
I've been listening to Touhou Project music on Youtube for well over a decade and when I see a picture in a video that I particularly like, I find it online and use it as my wallpaper until I find another that I like enough to replace it with. I'm running dual monitors so I use one picture for each. These are my previous and current wallpapers, I used the last one for a couple years and only recently switched to the new ones a few months ago.
While it's not PC, my phone currently cycles through 4,135 pictures in an album at random. Changes it up every 2 hours.
Album!
My work laptop has a Siemens gas turbine, cuz work.
My desktop has been the same since I managed to install Arch and stuck with it.
A photograph of fireflies in a forest, specifically the first in the series after the text description. I prefer natury photos overall, and love how the patterns feel almost abstract if you don't look closely.
black solid color thats it i prefer this one in all my devices
I've got a folder of about 500 wallpapers, from an artist whose work I love, that rotate every 10 minutes. I really love seeing video games and a smattering of pop culture stuff rendered in his paintings.
https://www.patreon.com/Orioto
Horseshoe Bend, Arizona. Taken at dusk for maximum orange.
Fedora 33, Dusk
I'm currently in a city-scape phase of wallpapers. On my laptop, I've got Apple's animated wallpaper of NYC. On my desktop, I've got a static wallpaper of San Francisco. I don't change my wallpaper too often, maybe once a year, or even less frequently.
Just the default windows 11 blue one. I never look at it unless I reboot my computer so I never bothered to change it
I use wallpaper engine (https://www.wallpaperengine.io/en) with this (https://ko-fi.com/s/0dff38ad51) Zelda art on my landscape monitor and this (https://ko-fi.com/s/44590c2a61) Zelda art on my portrait monitor.
Currently the desktop has a photo I took on a trip to Hawaii -- we hiked the Kilauea Iki crater and it's just a shot from when we got to the bottom of the inside. I did edit out the other hikers. Usually it's James Webb photos. I change them manually when I get bored of them, or have something I really like.
On the phone is an image made by a Facebook friend which is an abstract greyish blue and gold swirly nautilus and bubbles. She is a professional artist afaik but seems to do these for fun. I suggested she should sell them as phone wallpaper, but she wasn't interested. Prior to that I used various screenshots from Mateusz Skutnik's Submachine game.
My wallpapers are always rotating every thirty minutes. I like to focus on featuring video games that I've enjoyed although I do feature other things too.
You can view my current selection here (all 1920x1080).
Mars and Milky Way, spanned across my two 1440p monitors. On one of my favorite Steam apps, Wallpaper Engine.
There's something very 'classic' about space photos as desktop wallpapers. They just work so well.
Like many here it seems, I spent a lot of time curating wallpapers in my youth, but spend practically no time on it now.
My work Macbook is whatever the OS version default is. It's nice enough and I rarely actually see it beyond the little bit near the dock that windows don't expand into. Related, I'm one of those heathens that fully expands (but not full-screens) windows on a Mac and uses the Mission Control feature to jump around.
My desktop is hooked up to a relatively new 65" 4k OLED TV. Right now it's black with no desktop icons to minimize what little chance of burn in remains these days. I did spend some time trying to find interesting and/or visually pleasing fine art to use the tv as a digital frame. My hope was to do something with the big black rectangle while (mostly passively) exposing my young kids to a little bit of fine art in the home. I had a hard time finding any digital copies with both high enough resolution and a landscape aspect ratio close enough. I ultimately gave up the search. If anyone has some recommendations here, that'd be great.
https://imgur.com/a/u9jZ25D
for both, I have the dracula color scheme with each pattern. The lines rotate every hour w/ macos.
I use a twm, so I only see a little bit of it where I have gaps / padding
I change it maybe about every half a year, sometimes less often. Almost always it's art from some game, I'd say most of my wallpapers were from Magic: The Gathering. Despite everything, the art for MTG always was incredible -- here's the official site where they put up new wallpapers regularly and have been doing so for years. Other times it's just some cool art from some other game, currently it's Mizuki from Arknights.
I just use the landscape photos that come with Linux Mint. Right now, it's a desert scene of White Sands, with a rising sun.
For years, I'd use Hubble shots for wallpaper, but haven't done that since I migrated to Linux some seven or eight years ago. Guess I wanted a clean break from my Windows era.
90% of the time it's something green with plants. I don't love AI generated art, but it's great for an endless supply of wallpapers for widescreen monitors :)
My current one
My current wallpaper is this. That being said, this thread is making me consider looking for a new one since I've had it set to this for a few months.
Lately, I've chosen wallpapers that match my chosen theme. My preferred color scheme is Gruvbox-like, and so the wallpapers I've chosen to go with that:
Work (Macbook): NASA's Apollo Flight Diagram
Home (Framework/Linux): Astronaut with a jellyfish
Since around 1996 or so I've always used a picture of stars with the logo from one of my favorite TV shows: Red Dwarf. I only altered it a few times from the original 800x600 up to the current 1920x1080 as I got new displays. It's kind of like a familiar home now, always a welcome sight every couple months or so when I reboot or happen to cycle to the one virtual desktop I try to keep free.
Dark version of Scarlet Tree by axo1otl (https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/dark.png). It looks really pleasing to me and doesn't clash with anything I have on my desktop. The light version i very nice too, but the dark version has some really nice purple colors.
My desktop wallpapers have always fallen short of my ambitions. For years I've wanted to curate a collection of amazing landscapes, serene candid moments, and inspirational adventures, but it's just entirely too much to wade through all the subsmissions on wallpaper sites.
I'm currently using the collection from Linux Mint 12. I looked around and found that the wallpaper collection from each release is available for download, so I got them all and just set them to cycle through a collection at random. I've been impressed, Mint has had some good ones over the years.
It rotates through a collection of wallpapers scavenged from /r/spaceengine
Link
Link password:
Tilde12345!I use KDE on Aurora (Linux) and at one point had planned to just set up to use the dark variant wallpaper for each release, but got stuck on Kay Dark, I believe the 5.26 wallpaper.l
Anything else, like my Framework 16 and Surface Go running Aurora just gets the current KDE wallpaper.
For some years I collected many, many wallpapers and would randomly rotate among them, then one day decided to make it rotate randomly every 5 minutes, that would ensure I'd be surprised by a different wallpaper nearly every time i reached the desktop. I've left it that way but have largely stopped collecting wallpapers after i hit 3000, and frankly should reduce the number at some point because who needs so many wallpapers? Also i suspect my tastes have changed enough that at least some very few are no longer to my linking, definitely should set time aside for this at some point
Right now just checked and it's this one, in a few minutes it will be something else.
I've got a gallery of about 500 images it rotates between. It's a mix of my own photos I've taken, stills from anime, space pictures, wallpapers from smashing magazine posts over the early 2010s, video game promo arts and screenshots, cities (mostly fantasy and sci-fi, but a few real ones), and a handful of others.
Right this very moment it's one of my photos from within Phoenix Park