[EvanAnderson]

Sort of. I set solid colors on Windows machines because I'm frequently connecting to them over low bandwidth, high latency links using RDP. Pictures are slow even with bitmap caching (though my pure and refined hatred is saved for apps and websites that do "fade" and animation effects in the UI, particularly native apps that ignore the OS settings for these "features").

The decision to set the .DEFAULT profile wallpaper (the desktop that appears behind the logon UI) to a photo for Server (2016) still irks me. Sure-- set that on the desktop OS, but servers don't need pretty pictures by default. (This decision is emblematic of the "children are running the pre-school" mentality that seems to be pervasive at MSFT now.)

[Melatonic]

Good practice but RDP should automatically not be showing the desktop background anyways (depending on RDP settings). You could also set a desktop background if you like and manually tell RDP to never show the background of the system your connected to.

[EvanAnderson]

I push down a solid color background w/ Group Policy everywhere I can.

re: the RDP client settings - I can certainly control that. I just usually forget to. The default "Experience" setting for Microsoft's RDP client is "Detection connection quality automatically" and it has a much more optimistic view of "connection quality" than I do.