My wallpaper is a gorgeous, high-resolution picture of my first cat, long-passed. It makes me happy to see it when I log in or tab between windows or whatever, but for the most part, I work full-screen so I rarely see it. So in part, I agree with this.
But also, the idea that the wallpaper on your computer was too distracting, that the longing for carefree sunny days, and the harsh crash back to reality was too hard on you - I think this speaks to more issues than that you have a too-nice picture on your computer.
You could just as easily have the same problem with that photo, framed physically next to you on your desk or on the wall. The problem isn't with the photo on your computer, the problem seems to be more that your work is making you miserable. (Seriously, ten hours a day working? That's at least two too many.)
I'm, of course, reading into this, I don't really have sufficient context for the whole story, and your work could be very satisfying and you just long for more quality time in your work/life balance. But _that's_ the issue here, not whether the thing that reminds you that your life is out of balance is on your computer or on your desk or in your mind.
As much as I understand the reasoning behind this thought, I do not agree with it. Yes, my devices are tools and as much as possible, I'd like to keep my tools looking nice. For me, part of that is having a nice wallpaper. I am forced to use a Windows computer at work but you know what? I actually like the new picture they use on the lock screen everyday. It's simply the feeling of "oh that's a nice looking place" and then getting to work.
I just despise the fact that you can’t go back from login to the wallpaper, because I always end up processing that the image was interesting after the going through the motions
Wow, hello friends. I had never thought there were others like us.
I resonate with the mental health and minimalist themes. Also, I personally feel that even though I don't have wallpapers anywhere, I nevertheless have a strong aesthetic. I take time in choosing my editor font, colours, spacing etc. And I have a particular preference for dark over black modes for example.
I also never listen to music when focussed. But I play guitar and very much enjoy diving into Youtube musical rabbit holes with my headphones turned right up.
Might I even go as far to say that the plain black wallpaper philosophy is more about the joy of colour and stimulation than conventional wallpaper!?
I like my wallpaper but yes I don't often listen to music while working, it's distracting. I don't want my music listening to become background, I like to listen intently.
And yeah, I also keep my guitar by my desk and pick it up for a break several times a day. I paint too, I have the easel on the other side so I can take a more occasional break to paint. I don't claim this makes me a better programmer or helps concentration or anything like that, just for fun.
A strange thing I discovered after buying my last Android phone was that it wouldn't let me set a plain black wallpaper. I could only choose from photographs. To set the wallpaper to black, I had to install a third-party app. The app only had one button: 'change background color to black'. It also came with a 'pro' version, that would let you choose from other shades of black for a fee.
I'm surprised you didn't simply take a black photo. I used to cover up the lens with something opaque in order to take one when I had a black wallpaper.
he can just take screenshot of black part of screen, crop just the black part and use it as wallpaper since it will be stretched/repeated, so even if it's just few pixels it's enough for whole screen
Don't you think it's silly that I can't choose the color of my desktop background on a modern phone? These workarounds -- taking photos, taking screenshots, creating a single black pixel in photoshop and emailing it to myself -- shouldn't be necessary. It's a bit like someone complaining that a park's benches were removed, and everyone telling that person the different objects they could bring to the park to sit on instead.
It's silly to complain not all launchers provide same features like Nova launcher by your logic. Nova launcher has option for No wallpaper only with black color, no selectable solid color.
It's feature YOU are missing, some launchers have it, some don't, nobody stops you from installing launcher which has features you desire. But you don't have to even do it since there are simple workarounds how to set solid black home screen, take photo with covered lens, download black pixel, crop screenshot, etc.
If they added option for no picture and chose black for no picture you would complain why they don't provide color picker.
Should I flood random Android threads threads and complain you can't even select multiple threads in Signal to archive/delete them at once? I remember when they did same with photos, you could send only one at once. Should I blame my Android phone for something stupid Signal does? I could just use WhatsApp which has such basic feature. Blame dumb launcher you use, not the phone.
> Should I flood random Android threads threads and complain you can't even select multiple threads in Signal to archive/delete them at once?
I don't think that's a fair comparison. I posted about how my phone, by default, had no functionality to set a solid color background, in a thread about setting your phone's background to be a solid color. I think that's relevant.
I just find it amusing that setting a solid background color is no longer considered basic functionality for an OS, and people have to use 'workarounds' or install third-party apps to achieve it. It sounds like we fundamentally disagree that this is something worth commenting on, so I'll leave it at that.
I tried this and the phone asked permission for the default wallpaper app to access my photos. It was unclear what else it might use my photos for, so I said no.
I just think it's interesting you wouldn't trust a built-in app to not do something nefarious with your photos yet you'll trust a random third-party app to be safe.
Black specifically or any solid color? If it's any solid color that makes sense, why should they implement a color picker and image generator themselves instead of just letting you use whatever picture you want, allowing you to go to any of the hundreds of sites out there that'll let you do that and save the picture.
I personally use a black desktop background - and a black shell background as well - as a way of establishing negative space. It feels much cleaner and less distracting than some of the other common backdrops I've seen: colorful wallpapers adding art to my desktop, semitransparent shells distracting me with what's behind them, and I'd be remiss without mentioning Aero on Windows, which turned the entire window stack, titlebars and all, into layers of transparencies.
I don't use a tiling window manager, but I never see my desktop either. The last time I remember serious thought about desktop appearance was setting it to a solid colour to save RAM ... in the late 1990s. I just minimised a bunch of windows to discover that the latest Kubuntu has hidden a rather pretty alien landscape painting there.
Switched to Sway which is a tiling window manager. Previously I used Gnome and my first thought was this makes wallpaper pretty much useless. I have gotten used to it. The only problem is I can't do the same on my work mac.
In case I want to take a nap in a room with a computer, I don't have to shut off the monitor to turn off the light it emits because the desktop is already black.
I do the same (though not black, but plain solid colors) and it’s that much easier to quickly acknowledge windows borders or the lack of any foreground window (a popup left on corner of the screen on a busy desktop pic becomes a game to find)
That said
> You shouldn't let them seduce you into thinking that what you see on a screen is better than the vibrant world outside it.
This sounds like a red flag…I hope the author isn’t starting to burn out or in a utterly shitty environment where looking at the screen is really that much better.
> This sounds like a red flag…I hope the author isn’t starting to burn out or in a utterly shitty environment where looking at the screen is really that much better.
Huh? I just read it as, "Do as much as you possibly can away from a computer, and don't get sucked into computers, virtual worlds, or any of that absolutely human-toxic crap we use them for these days."
And I 100% agree. I greyscale half my systems and my phone for exactly the same reason - to make them as not-appealing as possible. I can still do everything I want, but my phone, especially, isn't sickeningly saturated. It's absolutely jarring just how synthetic-color phones are once you've gotten used to them in greyscale.
I also do a solid colour with low saturation for clearer window borders. It is also good if you send a lot of screenshots to colleagues and don't want any extra visual noise in them if you hastily capture too wide.
I use dark grey with no icons. Black is quite stark and it's hard to tell if the display is on. It's extremely rare that I even use the desktop for anything other than to have a window covering it up. An update replaced my background with a photo and I didn't even realize it for probably months. It was up so long the photo was out of season and I barely recalled it being changed.
Tools not fashion? Sheesh, get over yourself and gatekeeping what others can enjoy.
I take a much different approach. I put safe for work images into my wallpapers folder, usually found on t-shirt websites. Then every 5 minutes the wallpaper changes to the next random image in my folder.
It gives a nice heart beat to the day. If I’ve seen the wallpaper flicker 4 or 5 times I should look away for a moment.
I have found intervals between 5 and 12 minutes work best. Just often enough you notice it, but not so often that it’s distracting.
Isn't that the best color to show all the dust on the screen?
Personally I can't really stand people taking form over function when I see people with beautiful empty home screens on smartphone and they always end up explaining how practical it is work words "but" or "just" because it's just not practical. I'm using very well organized Sunfire home screen with folders so I can get to desired app work minimum amount of taps possible and still leave middle part empty to see the wallpaper.
Same goes with wallpaper and desktop extremists, some people have desktop full of icons that you have trouble to find something, some are same as phone extremists missing the point of desktop. Here I'm closer to the empty side since I can get by with only few icons phys quick launch since anyway most of the screen is covered by centered windows so there are strips of desktop only on sides where are most of the (useful) icons.
Plain black wallpaper would be just too plain for me, my wallpaper has to be muted (usually empty road or weather over country, rarely space, current one looking through blurred/foggy window, next one I plan to use iceberg but it will be tough one since they are quite bright, maybe underwater section), nothing shining blinding my eyes and the most important aspect is readability of fonts since I drag and drop stuff all the time while working to/from inbox opened in browser.
Terrible philosophy, or at least generalizing without any justification. Devices can be anything. Utilitarian tools, fashion statements, artistic expressions or whatever you want really.
Some authors have remarked that we're really homo faber, tool making men, and so if you want some individuality in the tools you work with go for it, in many ways they define who you are. No need to make your computer a dreary black box that you can't have any fun or play with.
Yes, it is akin to “Your food is fuel” which can also be taken to the extreme point of not aiming to enjoy food.
Minimising recreational time on the computer resonates with a lot of geeks. Reminding yourself to go outside with a black background to indicate that the computer is off when work is closed sounds like a good approach.
I still prefer a background image that makes me happy.
I don't do it based on some philosophical reasons, and I've never heard of the guy he references, though I do have that philosophy. I keep my phone background black because it's an amoled display. It makes it easier to read and saves battery.
My workstation currently has the default sway wallpaper because I can't be bothered to install swaybg and don't really care. How often do you look at a wallpaper on a tiling wm anyway?
I've been using black wallpapers on laptops for... man, has to be almost 20 years now. I used to run multimedia for a church group on a Mac with Keynote, and all our song lyrics and everything else started and ended with a fade from black or fade to black. This meant that instead of having to try and organize a full deck before every Friday, I could just have all the needed stuff open, and if the worship band decided to change order of songs for some reason or another, it wasn't hard to follow. It worked well, and I don't think anyone who wasn't up with me in the multimedia area realized that they were seeing desktop wallpaper most of the time.
Related, I'm exceedingly adverse to icons on my desktop - because more than a few icons would spill to the other desktop when resolutions changed to match the (old, beat up, I think 1024x768 at best) projector we used, and therefore show up on the presentation screen.
I still think Keynote is the best presentation software I've ever used... even though I don't use Macs anymore. :/ Just means I recognize how horrid LibreOffice is at doing any sort of slide layout. :(
Using EXWM, while I can have a "wallpaper" and transparent buffers to see it I agree with the author the "desktop" concept was a fail to replicate in a virtual world the physical desktop, something like we have seen for entire virtual offices in the old general-magic [1]
Icons are still hyper-used by many and considered deprecated for similar reasons: you can quick launch something and it will inevitably cover anything.
Unfortunately people do not really want a "desktop computing model", even most programmers fails to understand it stating it's impossible. Even some fellows admins when I rarely present something in org-mode seems to feel the WOW effect and have issues understandings what happen.
It's a shame for a reason: understanding computing is the key for a social advance, like almost any new tech, but such knowledge MUST BE spread in the sense that not only few techies have it. To evolve people need to understand the tech and profit from it.
I suppose if you wanted to go whole hog, you could take a similar approach to what Australian law mandates for cigarette packaging: set the background to unpleasant shit brown and have images of the corpses of people involved in texting and driving accidents and social media provoked suicides, with warnings in huge white letters like "DEVICE OVERUSE CAN KILL" or something.
I honestly don't think wallpaper will affect you (or your "relationship" with devices) that much, but do whatever works for you.
FWIW, I normally just use the default wallpapers came with the device. They are typically some landscapes or color gradients that don't have much fine details to inference with the icons, and that's good enough for me.
> Your devices are tools, not fashion accessories. You shouldn't let them seduce you into thinking that what you see on a screen is better than the vibrant world outside it.
huh? yes, my devices are tools, not fashion accessories. I don't let wallpaper--or skins [barf]--distract me from thinking that what I see on a screen is better than the vibrant world outside it. Hey, call me autistic, but I love computers for themselves, and while I like the technology of textures and video and graphics, I love the computer itself more and don't like a lot of visual clutter.
And I've been staring at screens since before most of you were born so please don't try to pass along your wisdom as if I just don't know yet what I'm missing :) I love actual wilderness, but anything short of actual wilderness feels fake, and wilderness is unplugged, so I simply prefer computers, there's a whole vibrant world in there.
I use a dark navy/grey during the day because it’s pleasant and easy on my eyes, or all my displays on a lime-like color when I’m on meetings because it gives me good color balanced lighting on camera. I use aliases in iTerm2 (macOS) to toggle them:
It wasn't the wallpaper making OOP unproductive, that's obvious because he's written this article which is largely derivative of an article he links to.
That's a waste of time as all he wants people to do is copy something hes just done!
My computer is neither a tool nor a fashion accessory. It’s a ship, and it has a name, and it has taken me places I wouldn’t otherwise be able to imagine. You can paint it black if you want to, but you better treat it right.
I’m the same way since forever. Then again, on iPad I still have the default background. On my phone I set it to a picture I took like 10 years ago (a blue sky with yellow leaves in the foreground) and forgot since then. I guess I’ll change those now. :)
The thing is, the only time I see the background is when I boot up / log in. I keep apps up full screen. I only launch apps using search or the taskbar or dock (I guess on iOS you have go home and swipe down to search though). I only look at the desktop on the rare chance I saved something I need there.
The stickers are functional. When you're in some all-day peer-coding-in-a-conference room thing, and all lock and suspend laptops to go to lunch, it makes it much easier to tell which of the ten identical laptops is yours when you come back.
Edit: See also why getting the same black rolling suitcases as everyone else doesn't make sense.
You'll pry xsetroot -solid "#333333" from my cold dead hands. Seriously, like the author, I too find wallpapers pointless. I also use a TWM (i3 to be specific) and hardly see the desktop, so that makes wallpapers worth even less. i3bar has a black background, and that's the reason why I use #333333 instead of black. On my phone, I just use a 1920x1080 black .png file that has a file size of 425 bytes.
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options none
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background color-shading-type 'solid'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background primary-color '#000'
For those of us in GNOME land. gnome-tweaks will let you strip the image file, but there's no UI for setting the background color, which defaults to a muted blue.
Absolutely agree with this. I’ve used a dark neutral color for my background, lock screen, etc for a decade.
I think it offended my girlfriend when she wasn’t on my lock screen, but she got over it and now we’re married and have a kid.
More seriously, it’s just a lot easier to find what I’m looking for on top of a neutral background. It’s not a moral imperative but I will probably stick with it for another decade.
I do the same for my work phone and laptop. (The laptop Windows lock screen is the mandated company logo screen -- making it easy to see if the computer has been locked when you've left your cubicle.) My tablets have a grey "smoke" background. I'll sometimes do it with my personal phone and computers; but, I tend to change those every so often.
I don't use plain black wallpapers because it makes dust/fingerprints etc on my laptop screen easily noticable, so prefer relativily minimalist wallpapers.
Used to like "crowded" wallpapers like cityscape, but found it distracting in the last few years.
I have wallpapers on my desktop and phone, but honestly hardly ever look at them. Even on the desktop, I pretty much always have various programs maximized or nearly so. If I feel the need to take a break, I either just browse the web (awkward-look-monkey.jpg) or get up from the computer.
I only ever used plain black wallpapers on my AMOLED displays and never their LED counterparts. I guess it's a matter of preference whether people prefer seeing black as an absence of light or with a white backlight.
Like most of the time we are doing stuff over ssh or editing text files. Yet we still give devs top of the line mac books. I dont think it makes sense other than as a status symbol.
I remember my first generation iPhone only had a black background and could not be changed. People blamed this at that time. Now I'm more convinced that this is intentional.
I use black wallpapers on all my machines as well. A black background means no icons get camouflaged by the wallpaper, and helps keep me focused on what I'm doing.
I recommend trying off black or various other dark but soft uniform backgrounds. Black can create a too harsh contrast with icons or maybe my eyes are more sensitive than yours.
i've used an all black wallpaper for decades, originating from using hp x-terms that could only display a handful of colors at a time. black was the safest bet to avoid wasting a color.
But also, the idea that the wallpaper on your computer was too distracting, that the longing for carefree sunny days, and the harsh crash back to reality was too hard on you - I think this speaks to more issues than that you have a too-nice picture on your computer.
You could just as easily have the same problem with that photo, framed physically next to you on your desk or on the wall. The problem isn't with the photo on your computer, the problem seems to be more that your work is making you miserable. (Seriously, ten hours a day working? That's at least two too many.)
I'm, of course, reading into this, I don't really have sufficient context for the whole story, and your work could be very satisfying and you just long for more quality time in your work/life balance. But _that's_ the issue here, not whether the thing that reminds you that your life is out of balance is on your computer or on your desk or in your mind.