Hi HN, in my last vacation, I built desktopcolors.com as a place to collect iconic solid background colors. Let me know what you think. |
Hi HN, in my last vacation, I built desktopcolors.com as a place to collect iconic solid background colors. Let me know what you think. |
I suspect there's some sort of strong association going on with color and tool use in our monkey brains.
My desktop color since win2k until today
I think the mono is IBM Plex? Idk what the other one is, but I'll be looking it up so as to be certain i never use it in my projects lol
I ran into this today on something unrelated. A page painted #0b0d14, and macOS screencapture wrote rgb(8,13,16) into the file, because the capture lands in the display's colour space rather than sRGB. Handing that same hex to a video encoder gave a third answer, rgb(9,11,17), this time from the yuv conversion. I had to ask for #0a0f13 to get back the value the page had actually painted.
So any swatch sampled from a screenshot of a running install is drifted by a few levels, silently, and a CRT is a further step away again. One line per entry saying "documented VGA palette" or "sampled from a VM" would make this citable rather than just lovely to scroll, and it would settle the Windows 98 teal question in the sibling comment.
“In most computer display systems, images are encoded with a gamma of about 0.45 and decoded with the reciprocal gamma of 2.2. A notable exception, until the release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in September 2009, were Macintosh computers, which encoded with a gamma of 0.55 and decoded with a gamma of 1.8”
https://twitter.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/162629846037367193...
https://xcancel.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/162629846037367193...
Another nerdy detail: the default background color on Windows XP was different depending on whether the theme was Luna or Classic. On Classic it is the same one as Windows 2000, but for Luna it is more blueish. I understand the denial, but it will be the 25st anniversary of the XP release in a few months, so it probably qualifies as classic by now.
Man, I wish I could have the 90s back. I absolutely despise where we went with tech in the past decade. I suppose that's a me problem.
On that graphics drivers note, I recall some video drivers were just so bad back then you might not get the full colors or resolution depending on your setup. Or some games might just look weird. But there was a cool thirdparty driver called UniVBE from SciTech[1] that you could install for almost any card and suddenly everything looked and worked so much more better, it was like magic. It was one of the go-to utilities I'd always carry around with me in my bag of floppy disks, full of unique, wonderous tools that the world has probably forgotten by now.
NeXTSTEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...
Plan9/Rio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/media/F...
But it's still on the todo list and I've also added NeXTSTEP.
But you're right. It's damaging to the actual facts and research I added myself. It might be better to remove the text where it's just an LLM placeholder.
Larger copies (like about and privacy) are written by me and then LLM translated.
The LLM descriptions are terrible though :) here's the one for Windows 98:
> Windows 98 refined the 95 formula, folding the web into the shell with Active Desktop while keeping the familiar look. Its Display Properties carried over the same grid of basic swatches and named schemes — teal still the Windows Standard default — with the classic reserved system colors tuned to their canonical values.
Instead of this, maybe find some copy related to the os (some quotes from the media / internet archive / something)?
Another user suggested to use media quotes etc. on OSs, which I think is actually a pretty good idea. I might swap the LLM generated placeholders for something like that.
It might sound ridiculous but using 9x with the default theme felt a bit depressing. It conjures images of being stuck in a building with that awful fluorescent overhead lighting on a day where it’s dark and dreary outside.
2000 on the other hand is about as refreshing as a gray 3D beveled OS theme can look, on par with Mac OS platinum and maybe slightly edged out by the bright colorful sunny tab titlebars of BeOS.
Then i set up 2000 as a server for the retro machines and everything clicked. Kind of amazing how many control panels in Windows 10 and 11 are essentially unchanged from 2000
I recently tried installing Windows 11 on a PC to run some games. The contrast with Windows 2000 is crazy, what a mess. Even just the control panel has three different UI frameworks mixed in one application. The whole thing is slow on a modern CPU with 64gb ram.
How did they get from Windows 2000 which arguably may have been ahead of Linux in terms of kernel and at least on par if not better than Mac OS in terms of UX to todays version of Windows 11?
I second the post from imfemambocus on color-sampling provenance. It would be useful to know the exact source for each.
I mostly used things like the fantastic Virtual OS Museum (https://virtualosmuseum.org/), run-in-browser VMs like PCJs Machines (https://www.pcjs.org/blog/2015/09/21/) or real installations inside a VM. I tried to avoid using Color Pickers etc. and read the actual value from the OS somehow (e.g. copy the HEX value shown in the UI), but in some cases, I had to go with the macOS Digital Colour Meter (set to sRGB).
Grey: #aaaaaa Green: #77aa77 Purple: #9077aa Blue: #7790aa Red: #aa5555
Source: https://github.com/bradleythughes/blackbox/tree/master/data/...
"Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color" 28.jan.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856262 117 comments
"Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?" 28.apr.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827214 296 comments
The color I listed is what Windows outputs on the software side. It's pretty much an EGA dither of bright cyan and bright green. It's what you would get with todays hardware.
When I get jobs to work on older systems I get a visceral sick feeling whenever the server version of windows with the touch screen interface comes up in RDP. Hideous and useless.
Win2k was easily the best thing they ever did. Every version of server since then has pushed admins to linux
Is that what you meant?
I also discovered a lot about the different OSs while researching the colors and I think it's a nice nod towards the museum character of the site to add fun/nerd facts when I stumble upon them.
But true, in many cases there is no need for text - I just removed the tagline which didn't add anything useful.
