At the moment of writing this I have no clue what my wallpaper is. I can't remember when was the last time I actually saw my desktop or interacted with it. I am not sure if this ball will also bounce on top of opened windows, but the whole thing made me think about the need for the desktop at all or how it could be made more useful.
Tangentially, I find wallpaper to be fascinating as it's one of the few aspects of desktop UX that is basically still 100% open to self-expression.
For functional reasons, every other desktop UI surface has converged with only a few minor variations. But the static desktop OS background - perhaps because it has no inherent functional purpose and remains covered most of the time - remains as a canvas.
I have 3 screens. Amount of pixels that show my desktop: 0
I am honestly confused why, years ago, I spent hours searching for the perfect wallpaper on the internet. And why I spent even more hours making my own, 20 years ago.
Nowadays I usually set one I like when I install the machine and maybe change it 1-4 years later. Is this what growing up feels like? :(
I remember when having a wallpaper was a big deal. I have a few screenshots of my desktops over the years and they do bring back memories. But I've used a tiling window manager for the past 5 years or so and there's no point having a wallpaper. I consider it a waste of screen space now.
OK: I want an animated wallpaper of desktop windows, with the windows moving from time to time. It's good to be distracted from the useful parts of your computer.
I guess I don't really see it as a wallpaper anymore, but an on-demand art gallery that just happens to be built using the wallpaper cycling functionality of macOS. My desktop is covered by windows 99% of the time anyway!
I have wallpapers on my desktop and phone, but honestly hardly ever look at them. Even on the desktop, I pretty much always have various programs maximized or nearly so. If I feel the need to take a break, I either just browse the web (awkward-look-monkey.jpg) or get up from the computer.
For how long, approximately, can you see your desktop's wallpaper during a day? I see mine for about 5 seconds during the boot, after that Chrome auto-launches, and I never see the desktop until the next reboot (all the non-browser apps I use are pinned on my taskbar).
So what's the point to change it? Instead, I always change my mouse cursors to the Garfield theme from defunct Microsoft Plus! -- they are of pretty nice orange color.
I learned of it when my desktops broke moving from F31 to F32 a few weeks ago.
While backgrounds are functional to me, wallpapers are non-essential, personal, and take time I don't care to spend to pick out, so I use plain colors to quickly indicate the purpose of the desktop I'm operating out of.
It's something I've been able to implement across every distro, every WM, and every DE for... as long as I've used virtual desktops.
So now I have to take something simple and make it complicated with a package or a plug-in because someone thought a half century-old concept could be abandoned on a whim.
I've also had a similar, but slightly different idea for a practical desktop display - get it to show nice tidbits like a wallpaper. For example, a Newton's cradle, or a spinning top, or a lava lamp or whatever folks put on their desks. Though coding it would be a bit of a challenge for a non-CS guy like me.
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