[vlowrian]

As someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes.

Some additional examples beyond the OP:

- In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank).

- GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions (see: https://www.tc3.dev/posts/2021-09-04-gnome-3-solid-color-bac...).

The pattern here seems pretty clear: a half-baked feature kept alive for niche users, rather than either properly supporting or cleanly deprecating it. Personally, I’d love to simply set an RGB value without needing to generate a custom image. But given the state of things, I’d rather have one solid, well-maintained wallpaper system than flaky background color logic that’s barely hanging on.

[woolion]

I checked in KDE, since I'm generally confused as to why it's not more popular now: in the wallpaper settings you choose `wallpaper type: plain color` and it gives you a color picker to set it.

It also shows you the screen you set it for, and a boolean to set it for all screens at once.

[cogman10]

I think it's historic reasons.

KDE used to be the "bloated" desktop way back when (I know, pretty silly and laughable now given the current state of things).

That cemented Gnome/Mate into a lot of major distros as the primary DME. Ubuntu being the most famous.

The QT licensing situation is also a bit of a bizarre quagmire. There are certainly people that don't like KDE for more ideological reasons.

Personally, none of this bothers me and it's what I use for my personal computer. KDE is just so close to exactly how I'm used to interacting with computers anyways growing up through the Win95 era. It is so close to the Windows experience you want to have.

[greenavocado]

Those of us that use KDE don't necessarily broadcast it

[myfonj]

Last time I used an Android (Galaxy) phone, to have a solid pitch-black background (which I thought made sense for modern phone displays energy-wise, besides looking pretty swell), I had to download — yes, D-O-W-N-L-O-A-D — some black image from some "Galaxy Store" thing or whatnot to achieve that. It was free, but it seemed like an exception there.

Something that should be a default option, or a single-tap switch in settings, turned into a chore consisting of a period of agonising disbelief, doubt, denial, search, and eventually bitter acceptance.

[whynotmaybe]

I had to take a picture with my finger on the camera to have a black image to use as background.

[gymbeaux]

A black background on an AMOLED display (something Samsung Galaxy phones tended to have) would use less energy because “pitch black” on AMOLED is literally turning the underlying pixels off- with LED displays, that’s not possible.

[graemep]

I use an alternative home screen app to deal with stuff like this.

[andrepd]

> GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions

There's the peak GNOME experience.

[nullc]

My analogous gnome experience was that on my tv-computer I was using 4x scaling, because TV and because my distance vision stinks.

At some point they decided 2x (3x?) scaling was enough for anyone and took away 4x, I didn't notice because I was already set at 4x and it continued working. Somewhat later they took away the backend, and then my system crashed with no error message immediately at login.

After much troubleshooting replaced a movie night, I inquired about the functionality being removed and was berated for using an undocumented/unsupported feature (because I was continuing to use it after the interface to set it had been removed, without my knowledge).

I'll never use gnome again if I can help it.

[AHTERIX5000]

Or the display sleep menu which offers choices like 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 and 30 min timeout but no more than that unless you use external config editor.

[wlesieutre]

Also in macOS recently, I've set a solid color and it has reverted itself to some default forest photo several times.

I suspect this is related to the System Preferences rebuild, since it's worked fine for 20+ years of OS X before that.

[RajT88]

I too prefer a solid color.

However, I've noticed, there's not much point in changing it. Showing the desktop is a waste of screen real estate because of the generations of abuse of desktop shortcuts. Even if you are careful, it becomes a cluttered wasteland (on Windows anyways). I just learned to never use the desktop for anything and always have windows up on various monitors.

[hennell]

My windows desktop remains pretty organised, occasionally there might be an app appear. My mac however I gave up on, it's just a mess of screenshots and files you have to drag n' drop from somewhere and the desktop is just where that ends up. I used to have a script that moved the screenshots but it's easier to just live in chaos.

[sixothree]

I would love to store documents in the My Documents folder if applications actually had respect for me. Windows should never allow an application to just dump stuff in the Documents or Desktop folder without my permission.

[bee_rider]

I thought Windows programs generally asked if you want to make a desktop icon for them. (But I only use Windows as a video game console).

[chuckadams]

I’m one of those people who can’t abide having desktop icons stick around. I don’t even use it as a staging area since I discovered Yoink. I kind of miss dragging disks to the trash to unmount them though. And the Oscar extension where he sang a little song every time.

[CRConrad]

Windows 10 has a setting to allow you to choose if it should show or hide desktop icons. Dunno about 11.

[hnlmorg]

KDE works pretty well here. I set a solid colour of black on one PC which powers a projector.

[Telemakhos]

I'm trying to reproduce the bug on macOS 15.4.1, but it lets me pick solid colors just fine, either from a list or by adding a custom color.

[js2]

Fixed in 15.4.1:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256028948?answerId=2613...

I also ran into it with 15.4.0 and worked around it by creating an image that's the solid color I like to use. It turns out that the system-supplied solid color options are themselves just 128x128 pixel PNG images too:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256028948?answerId=2613...

[sixothree]

The number of times my solid color preference has been replaced with all black over the last 10 years is absolutely astounding. I have no understanding of why this seems to be so difficult.

[Merad]

You know, I bought a MBP as a personal machine 6 months ago - my first Mac - and this post made me realize that I couldn't even tell you what its desktop looks like. I'm sure I saw it a few times when I was doing initial setup, but I don't remember anything about. I used to do things like set custom wallpapers, but probably around 10 years I pretty much stopped using the desktop entirely.

[ryandrake]

How do you not have a desktop? What do you see when all your applications are closed?

[ryandrake]

Maybe I'm still living in the 1990s, but isn't the graphics API call to paint a solid 2D rectangle infinitely faster than the call to blt a 2D image to the screen, with possible arbitrary scaling and clipping? Or is everything just natively textures now and we don't even have 2D drawing hardware?

[anthk]

The second.

[tough]

It kinda seems to me this is better solved by a webapp that lets you generate any background image and download and you set it up on your OS.

[gjsman-1000]

When you say it that way, it's actually baffling that there's still separate code paths for solid background colors.

Just offer a background picker, and have it generate a 1x1 PNG, for the color selected. Just like that, you can use the image background code path for everything; and the code for generating the image almost certainly exists in the OS already. Maybe add some metadata to the generated image to filter it from the images picker, and you're done.

[jug]

Weird. Using a custom solid color background works in my install of macOS. But I do use 15.4.1 in case the fix was just released.

[layer8]

I keep a single-color image around for that reason.

[nandomrumber]

I recently acquired a ThinkStation P910 dual CPU Xeon E26xx with 64GB RAM and 1080GTX

Quite a capable machine for my uses.

Not supported in Windows 11. Maybe with some additional config? Can’t be bothered with something hat might turn out to be fragile and need more maintenance than I can be bothered with. That’s a young man’s gane.

Ok, I’m about due to give Linux another tickle anyways.

Hmm, which distro… can always give a few a spin.

Keep it simple, Pop!_OS.

Installed fast, no issues, runs fine, stable. Seems entirely usable.

Customisations? Nah, keep it simple.

I’ll set a black background though.

Nope.

[jeroenhd]

I wouldn't go with Pop_OS with that hardware. The Nvidia GPU isn't supported by the new Nvidia driver and because System76 is hard at work writing Cosmic, their repositories are quite outdated. Support for things like Wayland is quite mediocre in the old drivers.

Switching to upstream (Ubuntu) with KDE would probably be more your speed.

[RedShift1]

Par for the course with Gnome though, if you like customization, KDE is better.

[ohgr]

As much as I'd like a machine like that, my 5 year old random Lenovo 10500 desktop is probably more useful as a daily driver machine than an older workstation class machine at the sacrifice of no ECC RAM. I bought it when it was 3 years old and will use it for 4 years then get rid of it before it hits the tail end, the power supply dies or something else goes wrong. You avoid all the weird problems, the depreciation, the energy costs running like that. And you gain things like relatively competent NVMe slots, USB-C and other luxuries. And the single core performance is better than Xeons of the era and earlier.

win11 ltsc works perfectly on it. With a solid background :D

[loftsy]

Just make a black png and use it as the background?

[methuselah_in]

go with gnome fedora! and rest will be history or debian stable.

[jraph]

KDE Plasma (on any distro I guess) has clear, easy to reach and easy to use settings for this.