Do you use a system-default or a custom wallpaper for your personal computer? If custom, what kind of wallpaper & why?

I use #222e45. I think that it's been constant since the 1990s or so.

 $ convert -size 200x200 "xc:#222e45" example.png

I don't see it much these days, since I'm using sway, which does tiling window management. There's almost always something fully covering it now.

I have a folder with 598 pictures of stealth aircraft that are cycled through as wallpaper and screen saver.

I always use images from the JWST:

https://esawebb.org/images/?sort=-release_date

They're all gorgeous.

For my phone backgrounds, I use pictures made by Seok98.

GiTS/Jujutsu Kaisen anime girls.

*I'm so surprised how many people use solid colours. Interesting to see other peoples apparent mindset in that regard.

*Should also say I don't use desktop icons like a dirty pleb >:3 i use ubuntu btw (and idrc if you use icons)

I like black wallpaper. I like to keep the serial number of the machine visible. the wallpaper is black with the serial number.

my phone lock screen includes my imeis, mac address, bluetooth mac, model, and serial no

I'm just quirky like that

Anyone know if there's something easy to use like Wallpaper Engine for Linux? Specifically on Bazzite

Some relevant comms

• !wallpapers@lemmy.ca
• !wallpapers@lemmy.world
• !ultrawide_wallpapers@lemmy.world
• !wallpapers@sh.itjust.works
• !animewallpapers@ani.social

I use two different pieces of art I made myself for my mobile and desktop devices respectively!

I don't keep icons on my desktop, so contrast isn't something I worry about, and I'm a sucker for colors :3

Solid color: Light-ish dull-ish green. Been using it since I concluded that I didn't like the Win98 default, and it has carried over to other OSes after that.

Roughly #81e39b

$ convert -size 200x200 "xc:#81e39b" example.png

I have an anime girl wallpaper with a pink reddish theme

I always use a simple diagonal gradient with the three colours of the bisexual flag. I am bisexual, but it's mostly because I like the colours. Whenever I get a new device, I generate an appropriately-sized gradient for its screen using GIMP.

The one exception is the background of my Steam Deck in desktop mode, which is the following because I thought it was funny:

At work, all black, because I prefer working in a darkened room and sometimes I need to use the laptop in sunny conditions full of glare. I have no need of any extra light getting blasted at me not directly related to something I'm working on. Also, I get a kick out of the "Why are your other monitors off?" comments. Also, IT tends to clutter my desktop with a bunch of shortcuts with a hodgepodge of icon styles, it's a lot easier to visually parse these on a black field.

At home, the media server is directly connected to a TV with HDMI and has a desktop environment. My distributions default wallpapers always come in two varieties, colorful or greyscale. The server automatically logs into a restricted user account for family access to Kodi, retro arch, web browsing, etc., which has the colorful wallpaper. If for some reason I need to get into the admin account with a GUI, the desktop wallpaper is grey. It's like an always-on simplified color coded whoami. Since I almost never interact with this machine except through ssh or the services it hosts, this is the most amount of ricing I'm willing to do.

$ convert -size 200x200 "xc:black" example.png

I have a script that pulls a fresh image from NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day and sets it as a wallpaper. But I rarely see it because 99.9% of the time my windows are maximized and I don't have things on the desktop.

I like this artist’s stuff for my wallpapers on all my devices except my work machine:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zDalZ4

Chaotic neutral here

I cycle wallpapers from different OSes, but never the one running. Work W11 laptop has the Debian wallpaper now, OpenBSD laptop the Windows 10 backlit glass one, etc

(I do the same with game character names)

I'm using the "Astronomy Pic of the Day".

I have a selection of natural scenes - some that I have taken myself, other found on the web - that rotate each two hours around the day. Night shots at night etc.

I paid a stupid amount of money (because of currency conversion, their rates were reasonable) for some art for tattoos, and the artist formatted it as a wallpaper for me.

It has been my wallpaper ever since.

at work, on my main desktop, I use a picture I took on vacation (of Scotland)

otherwise I have to use a lot of servers so I color code the desktops to remind myself of what systems it is or how critical it is. Using red or uncomfortable colors on systems that are critical keeps me from making mistakes on them.

At home on my laptop, I have been using the KDE OneStandsOut wallpaper for a few years https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace-wallpapers/-/blob/master/OneStandsOut/contents/screenshot.jpg?ref_type=heads

its simple and nice to look at for a few seconds when I am actually looking at the desktop loading after a reboot or something

The Starry Night, on all my devices for about 5 years now Straight outta Wikipedia

I have a hyprland „rice“ config (didn’t do it myself) which came with beautiful backgrounds ootb but I don’t really use it at all. The one i mostly use is close to stock sway with the default sway-bg background.

Custom. I have a folder of wallpapers I've been accumulating over the past thirty years, since I got my first laptop (brick of a thing, too) on my way to college. There are photos, parks from comics, MS Paint drawings, diagrams, even screenshots of previous desktop setups.

Custom, but I understand the appeal of sticking with the default.

I think the issue with wallpapers is that there's a very fine balance that it needs to strike: not too simple that it's monotonous, but not too fancy that it's distracting and hides icons. Too many wallpapers swing too significantly in either extreme that I simply don't like the vast majority of wallpapers that I find.

Interestingly, KDE seems to strike this balance relatively consistently - they must be aware and are actively attempting to strike that balance. I don't know how else to explain it.

Custom wall papers always for personal machines.

I use to have a monotone black wallpaper because I had weird game glitches when I had a wallpaper, but I don't play that game anymore so now I have one of the moon.

Default, I love scarlet tree

Solid black to save my OLED screen from burn in.

TLDR: if you're a VRChat player/enjoyer, Find a cool world in VRChat to pose in with your favorite avatar by yourself or with friends and take a picture with the in-game camera.

Alternatively, "Elite Dangerous" is a great desktop background generator! Find a cool spot and take a screenshot. Boom. New desktop background haha.

/end TLDR

---

I play alot of VRChat and I found a cool world in VRChat called " VR art 'New place' ". It's basically a VR art museum where you click on the "painting" and it teleports you inside of it. The scenery in the world is super super pretty and very cool; I highly recommend it.

What I did is I found a spot that I thought would look good for a desktop background. I posed on a dock facing a giant moon. And then used VRChat's fly camera to give some distance. Thus making my avatar appear small in the center and expanding the view of the art in the world. That way the focus is moreso on the world with my small avatar in the center.

It's kind of like placing yourself in the middle of your favorite desktop background. Granted I suppose any experienced photoshopper or photographer could do something similar haha.

As for Elite Dangerous, I've enjoyed flying my ship to a cool star system and then using the spectator camera to take pictures of cool phenomena and use those as desktop background too. Some of my favorites include: landing on Ring planets, finding a tiny planet with a view of 3 or more stars, or pictures of black holes.

Slide show with slow changes, only every 6 hours. It shows a selection of my own photos of beautiful nature, according to the current season.

I prefer to use a photo I took and then build the rest of the desktop theme around it. Then again you end up looking at the desktop very little so it doesn't matter too much.

urban photography which i heavily edited

I have a photo of the outdoors somewhere. I change jt everybfew months to keep up with the season

Forrest's or plants. The green is relaxing.

Haven't set up my kde desktop yet, so default from install for now. My "other" os uses a totally black background (how often do I see any part of my de? only for a few seconds, before that the os had a folder of images downloaded from nasa of stars and other galactic images

I use JWST Images from NASA. It's a free library of fascinating high res images

I historically have looked for pictures that have a lot of visual depth, like a cityscape or a vista or the ocean or landscape something. It needs to be pleasant to look at and complex but not too busy. I also like there to be a range of emotions that I can feel from it, so that I'm not locked into anything depressing. Generally, the only times I see my wallpaper are when I'm overwhelmed and minimize/close everything, I'm looking for a reset, or on a phonecall and I'm thinking without doing anything else simultaneously.

An added bonus is symmetry, either a vertical line or horizontal, or multiple. Even more bonus is if it's natural AND aligned with the orientation (the picture not just being taken askew of a thing that is symmetrical). So that I can drag the selector with my mouse and make shapes. I know I'm not the only person that does this.

Oh also, brought sunlight and cool colors I find better. Nothing dark and broody or monotone, as those get old super fast. Imperial Boy (an artist) is close, but often either not detailed enough, or too gut wrenchingly melancholy for my sanity, or even not deep enough. Like imagine looking at a picture of a campfire vs being able to stare at an actual campfire. One of those is significantly more pensive.

I'll stick with these for years until I have a need to change, like from a serious life event.

Reading the other comments is wild. Everybody's so interesting and different. The people who are like, "i like this very specific shade of grey" i can't help but let my imagination run. You're either military or like a million of the same exact grey outfits with the same daily routine and the Up! music is playing.

I was running screenshots I would grab from anime if there was a lingering shot on a nice scene. Had a really nice sky and clouds shot for a while. Phone has had a nice Hiroshi Nagai painting since I got it.

Currently just on one of the Mint defaults since the latest installation. I'll change it. Eventually.

I have never really used wallpapers. I have always used an all black screen.

Now screen savers/locked screen images, I have numerous pictures I use of Star Wars things, mmy vacation photos etc.

I use KDE default wallpapers as well, because something keeps switching them as I regularly plug/unplug additional monitors and I don't bother trobleshooting the issue anymore.

I have a high-key photo of spring cherry blossoms, that I took myself on my SDDM greeter, though.

Used to have my own photo of a wall made of tires as my wallpaper as well.

Work computer or any windows machine: black. I have zero interest in wallpapers.

My home computer and my work from home computer are all KDE and I really like the slowly changing patterns ones. I should try and figure out how to make those, preferably in mostly dark and out of the way colors.

Why do people set wallpapers? When you are at the computer dont you use it for something? Why would you want a distracting wall paper in the way?

I use green.

I cannot share them because I ain't letting there be any chance of my favorite online artist know, but for a while I have been using a few of my favorites of his work in a background slideshow that changes every five minutes. It's wholesome furry art.

Before that, I was using wallpapers done from the guy who does the Pepper & Carrot webcomic. Then before that, I used a screenshot from a music video and had copies where all I did was open them up in Krita and change the colours around .

That's for my laptop.

For my desktop, my final and only windows device ( still running 10 but I'm moving it to an SSD and removing internet access so I can switch to mint most likely because of my dad making the switch scarely enough ), I currently have a lot of Tails fanart off of Pixiv I have running as a slideshow.

Before that, I used some images like a random Sly Cooper image I found or this fantastic image of the 2 main characters of the webcomic Peter & Company chilling under a tree as Peter plays on his switch and his guardian angel reads a book. Pretty normal furry stuff, I guess

I almost never use OS default backgrounds besides right now in a couple VMs I have to do some college work.

As pixel density has improved, I’ve gravitated toward highly detailed cityscapes. Like photos of Manhattan or Singapore or Tokyo (as examples). They just look so cool with tiny pixels.

I also run KDE. Living room PC I'm using:

https://github.com/y4my4my4m/kde-shader-wallpaper

https://godotshaders.com/shader/balatro-background-shader/

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XXtBRr

I really like the Balatro shader. This plugin is awesome eye candy and stable, highly recommend.

Desktop PC has three monitors, two are just static Images from Wallhaven. Primary is using another KDE plugin that reuses Wallpaper Engine themes I'm subscribed to via Steam back when I used Windows... somewhat. Don't recommend because it's prone to crashing when a theme is incompatible and you have to edit a config file to remove the broken paper entry to get your taskbar responsive again. I trial and errored until I just had a handful of my old favourites that work.

https://github.com/catsout/wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin

https://wallhaven.cc/

Animated: https://vidplay.io/stream/jmS-NRCQpClo6vdGe8N84A

I've got a small handful of random wallpapers I've collected over the years, but I'm really picky and almost always end up going with the stock wallpapers. I'm on Debian 13 and I've been using this one since Debian 11.

every system is different. landscapes, textures, shots from tv or movies, people.... only one is using 'defaults', the wp from the 'sunrise' win11 theme (was set to that for some screen caps and recording, to avoid any.. uh.. 'issues'.. over having copyrighted imagery in them--it was a still from one of the lego movies). my phone is anna and elsa and will always be anna and elsa. dunno why. it just is.

I use 3 of the "daily background" sources from KDE Plasma (one from NASA, and two artsy ones, one for each display). Unfortunately they don't seem to have a lot of variety. Well, besides the NASA one.

50% grey solid color. I SO do not care about my desktop background, and whenever I see one of these "beauuutiful" pictures I become a bit annoyed.

$ convert -size 200x200 "xc:gray50" example.png

Arknights wallpapers for the last 5 years. Suzuran and Lappland.

Almost-black solid color wallpaper, made it myself (IIRC I just screenshotted from some tool that displays colors after you enter a six digit hex value). It looks neat.

I found a bunch of 4k dark wallpapers and rotate them out occasionally with a script I wrote.

I run custom backgrounds.

my background is an edit of that one prince meme where it says "You can always discuss your wages, it's always legally correct" after my boss told us not to discuss our wages in a meeting. I raised hell in the group chat until I got her to admit, in text, that she legally cannot stop us.

It varies, right now I've got outdoor photos I took on my work computer and phone, and a game screenshot on my home computer.

#6a4d53 - I do care about it, but rather as the color in the window gaps.

I use a custom wallpaper. It’s a screenshot of Miller from The Expanse because he is my favorite character. My screensaver images are also from The Expanse.

Currently I have mine themed to vault-tec branding, but I'm not a big fan of blue so it will probably change soon.

I have Wallpaper Engine on Steam. My current wallpaper is a 1980s synthwave style animation of the big kalua mountain thingy.