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by vlowrian 409 days ago
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.

14 comments

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.

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.

> KDE used to be the "bloated" desktop

That’s not my recollection. I believe that the non-free license you mention was the major factor, in addition to the fact that KDE was written in C++ at a time when the free software community still preferred to write software primarily in C.

GNOME was written using a free software toolkit, and it was written in C, and it was associated with the FSF.

There were several eras of user and developer consternation. I definitely had the impression that the GP describes in the mid to late 2000s.
I distinctly recall people criticizing C++ programs as "bloated" and slow compared to pure C programs.
C++ is definitely a drawback for a long time. Not because it is 'bloated', but because of how ABI changes were handled. It is all history now.

Nowadays the major problem with KDE is that by the time it is stable a new QT major version gets released and along with that it essentially gets a major rewrite, which takes years to stabilize and once it does a new QT version is released, etc etc etc.

It depends. KDE3 under Debian was much faster than Fedora Core with Gnome 2.
Kde3 was already free when Ubuntu started.
KDE still seems pretty bloated
It's not bloated, it just has lots of options. If you like someone else to decide everything for you: buy a Mac or use gnome. But KDE is not for you then. Don't try to make it into something it was never meant to be.
I use Cinnamon. Less bloat, more coherent, still plenty of options
Yeah cinnamon is basically a remake of Gnome 2, from before the devs went batshit crazy and went more opinionated than Apple. It's not bad but I really prefer KDE, also because I think Qt is a much better desktop framework than GTK is.

But what things in KDE do you consider 'bloat'?

I rather think the right word is clunky: one of the dev is attached to Server-Side Decoration/against CSD for some reason (none of his arguments make sense), so every stock app are difficult to read and taking unneeded screen space. It's just bad UX.
Are you suggesting that avoiding client-side window decorations in favor of the traditional server-side approach is bad UX?
*It causes bad UX.
Are you being purposefully controversial (to not say trollish)?

To the exact contrary to what you assert, one of the prominent argument against Gnome that I've been seing times and times again in DE debates, is the "dogmatic" opposition to SSD from the Gnome project.

I think clunky and bloated both describe KDE actually
They're not arguing with you, they're yes-anding you. Read as "ah a one word opinionated description...let's steelman that. here's my one-word opinionated term: clunky. Here's what smells make me get that vibe. What smells contribute to the bloat one? :)"

Doubling down on short judge-y stacatto contributes to an aggressive "I don't need to tell you" vibe that would be sassy and fun, maybe, if in person. In writing online comments, it just means we need to get a 3rd comment from you before we get to anything I'm interested in (I don't particularly care what your one word description is, I don't know you)

One person's "bloat" is another person's "batteries included".
Cinnamon includes all the batteries I've ever needed without feeling bloated
KDE Wallet though?
Funny, I used to think it was bloat but then I got to use it to store passwords for remote servers accessed with ssh, and now it's a nice 'batteries included' for me, as GP mentioned. It has become so because it is nicely and seamlessly integrated.
Gnome has the same thing, and it's equally as annoying. Also you can just disable it if you really don't want it.
What about it?
If you think that then don't install everything under the sun or choose a better distro. You can just install only Plasma Desktop, Doplhin and the handful of utilities you actually use, you know?
xfce remains the best GUI for Linux (outside of the tiling WMs which are far superior). No I will never change my mind.
Gnome is a acquired taste, but it is also a lot less work to keep working then KDE or other desktop options.

There are a lot of people that bitch about it, but that is only because it is the most popular one and they think that Linux desktop is a zero sum game. They don't use Gnome most of the time and arguments tend to be parroting somebody else and probably out of date for years or just kinda made up conspiracy theories about Redhat or something.

The whole thing is pretty confused. Gnome being popular doesn't make KDE not be popular.

Those of us that use KDE don't necessarily broadcast it
Why? KDE is awesome.
I'm a recent convert from Gnome. Mostly cause Gnome seemed to have too many mysterious crashes—waking from sleep, switching between windows when video was playing—so much so that it was just easier to switch to something modern (as opposed to sway/i3) and not have to learn/rewrite keybindings.
No, KDE is KDE. Awesome is awesome. You can use awesome as the window manager for KDE (I have in the past), but you can do that with GNOME, Xfce, or LXQt as well.
Too busy building
Too busy to discuss your preferences. Not busy enough to not discuss your being too busy to discuss your preferences on internet forums.

I'm not trying to be mean here, I'm just fascinated by what people will consider to be a waste of time.

Evangelizing KDE is not something I care about
Yet you’re here
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.

I had to take a picture with my finger on the camera to have a black image to use as background.
I don’t know if that would do it or just return your dark current image.

The best thing to do is just take a file same as your screen resolution into your favorite image editor and fill it with actual true black. Save as png and send to phone.

Was not sure if sensor in pitch dark would catch some other radiation and output some pixel "grain" seen from high ISO or not, but from what I tried, visually the photo seems pretty black, so the method seems to be surprisingly usable.

As for "same image as your screen resolution": screenshot sounds like the exact fitting thing here. As a challenge, tried making screenshot black using stock Samsung "Gallery" and it seems that repeated Edit - Brightness: -100 - Save as copy, then open the copy and goto back to Edit can do the trick as well, after four or so copies. (Copies, because there is no way to re-apply same effect on the same photo, apparently.)

That's actually hilarious, so much high tech involved to get a dark background.
Another way is to do a Google image search for "black".
It should enter the competition of the most convoluted ways to have a black background on your phone.
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.
It’s proportional to brightness on OLED. You save a lot with a dark background/dark mode already, it doesn’t need to be specifically black.
I use an alternative home screen app to deal with stuff like this.
> 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.

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.

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.
30 minutes? That's a luxury! For me it has always been limited to 15 minutes in the GUI.
You can also use `gsettings set ...` on the CLI.
God forbid an input box in a GUI config dialog.
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.

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.

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.
On Mac I disable icons from appearing on the Desktop and instead add one of those fan-out folder links to my taskbar, sorted newest first. I just checked and I have 547 Screenshots dating back to around this time last year. Maybe it's time for a purge. :)

# Disable icons on Desktop

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop false

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.
Don't get me started... Office these days adds friction if you want to save documents anywhere but the Documents folder (where they get uploaded to OneDrive if you have it set up).

They've also disabled auto-save if you don't have the documents backed up by OneDrive, which is the most egregious for me.

Pro tip: Press F12 to directly open the traditional Save As dialog.

https://thetechmentors.com/f12-a-better-alternative-to-the-s...

Office has never had auto-save for local documents; it only had (and still has) periodic recovery saves. The primary reason they added auto-save for cloud documents is to facilitate multiplayer online editing.
Just create and use any other folder you like under %USERPROFILE% (usually C:\Users\username)? My Documents is a default location, but you can ignore it. Simply use your user folder as you would under Linux or whatever.
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).
Not always. It's up to their installer. And the installer doesn't have to ask (it can just do it).

The situation is better these days, with windows store apps. Still, I developed the habit of just never using the desktop in the XP days when things were really bad.

There was a war over your eyeballs, which had shady software vendors warring over desktop space, start menu space, taskbar space, even fucking file associations. I recall for a little RealPlayer and Windows Media Player used to yank back and forth file associations each time they ran, even if you tried to make them stop.

You should view this page in Microsoft Edge for the best experience! \s
No one of my biggest complaints about windows is the sheer number of apps that add an icon without asking. Sometimes it's even worse than an app, and Nvidia or AMD will add one in a driver update. Drives me nuts.
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.
Windows 10 has a setting to allow you to choose if it should show or hide desktop icons. Dunno about 11.
Yes, you can hide icons in windows 11 just by right clicking on the desktop and going to view > show desktop icons.
KDE works pretty well here. I set a solid colour of black on one PC which powers a projector.
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.
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...

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.
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.
How do you not have a desktop? What do you see when all your applications are closed?
macOS will re-open the programs you last had open, and reposition the windows to the same locations as before (though with dubious success at actually opening the correct files) upon restart, so it's entirely possible to have a perpetually-buried desktop that never becomes visible.
I always have at least a web browser open, and as the other comment said MacOS reopens apps on restart.
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?
The second.
No, not really. Everything is just rasterized triangles now, but whether they're textured or not is up to the shader your using.

A non-textured triangle will be faster than a textured one as it can just return a literal in the pixel shader instead of wasting time sampling a texture for each pixel.

However a single texture sample is so cheap on modern hardware that a specialized path for solid colors wouldn't be worth the complexity in a 2D setting. It's fast enough.

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.
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.

It feels like a lot of these non-sense features is what you get after years of fixes and releases, it's hard to envision a full system 10 years out and get it right, and there's almost never time to clean up unless it's a greenfield project or something.
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.
I keep a single-color image around for that reason.
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.

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.

I recently updated Pop OS to the Cosmic Alpha and it is much more to my liking than Gnome 3 ever was. I have an older Nvidia GPU though.
Par for the course with Gnome though, if you like customization, KDE is better.
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

Just make a black png and use it as the background?
Sure but why should a workaround be required for a feature that should work?
If they can't get colors to work, the software should just create the image itself and fake it.
It’s open source, I’ll “just write the code myself.”
go with gnome fedora! and rest will be history or debian stable.