My home PC was just formatted last week, so it’s pretty much a fresh install. My Work PC has confidential info on it and I’d rather not start job hunting.
@SSteve the image i REALLY wanted was a star destroyer over the Golden Gate. something akin to independence day, with a star destroyer in place of that ship.
@SSteve while that’s better than anything i could do, the shot i’m seeing in my head is taken from the Presidio…( you know, the future site of starfleet command…)
no, i’m not picky at all…
I have no problems giving love to the bay bridge. While I’ve never been out there, my mom was born in Oakland in early '46.( her folks were missionaries, they lived in Oakland(and were assigned a Church there) for a couple years towards the end of WWII, while studying Chinese language/culture (where they were heading) at Berkley.
I don’t know what half this stuff is and that malwarebytes thing is pissing me off. Someone other than me picks the background. It’s either a robot or a ghost so I don’t mess with it.
@luvche21 Thank you for the offer, but I actually have that in several different sizes/ratios. (We also have a huge framed canvas print on our wall.) I prefer this one so that I have space for icons without really covering the picture. After posting this I realized I’d let it get messier than I like and removed a bunch of the icons so it’s cleaner looking now, too.
@PurplePawprints well, I’m glad someone else here is a fan of that series, it was incredible watching it the first time, now I need to convince my wife to watch it with me! Do you know if anywhere streams it?
At work, I took a photo of the view to post on the desktop. This isn’t the final version with the monitors in the monitors in the photo reflecting the same image.
@KDemo No, but I’m a fan of this idea. I’d like to cycle my desktop images more often anyway, and making them semi-seasonal would be poetic, atmospheric, suave, etc.
I have this plan I’ve been fumbling around on for the kitchen, where I have a few wall spots that need decorations. My idea is to have a magnetic board that I can cover with seasonal paper, and on top of that tack up various ephemera. That way I’d get the seasonal variation, and also have more room for the sort of flim flam that currently chokes the front of my fridge. But my first idea (magnetic panels offa Amazon) was a fail… The magnetic surface wasn’t strong enough to hold things, even with strong Nd magnets as tacks, AND it was too heavy so it fell off the wall – I was using 3M sticky pads to hold it all up there. So now my plan is to get thin metal sheets and start with that as the base. Then my little Nd magnets will be strong enough, I think.
Yesterday, I did my periodic desktop cleaning at home where I create a folder named “desktop from <date>” (2018-01-09 in this case) and put all the icons that aren’t supposed to live on my desktop, plus the previous “desktop from <date>” folder into the current desktop from <date> folder.
My work desktop is similar, tho it has different icons and the background is Windows 2000 Blue instead of black. It is also not stretched across two monitors and hasn’t had the desktop cleaning thing done since early December.
@SSteve I don’t use mission control. Do you see that icon somewhere? If so, point it out and I’ll remove it so it will save dock space.
If I did need mission control, I just double tap on the magic mouse with two fingers. But my monitor is large enough that I can have several apps open without them overlapping. Even if I want more apps, I have a second virtual desktop that I access by swiping left and right on the magic mouse. This feature is handy if I’m using a virtual PC (VM Ware) in one window full screen and Mac programs too. I can switch between them but usually don’t need that feature.
@SSteve I don’t use Launchpad either so I just removed it. Don’t know why I didn’t do it earlier, maybe laziness. I either click on the app from the doc or go through the apps folder. I don’t really see a need for the Launchpad.
You must be a Mac user too since you recognize those icons. How are you liking it? I do because I get the best of both worlds. I can run Mac or Windows apps at the same time.
If I run a Windows PC, I cannot run Mac software unless I run weird software like Hackintosh which isn’t really in Windows. I have so many options to run Windows on the Mac using Boot Camp, VMWare, Parallels, Wine, etc.
@cengland0 I’ve used and developed for both Mac and Windows (and DOS) for 30 years. I bought a Mac Plus in 1986 but developed software for Windows 3.1 in the 90s. In the early 00s the company I worked for got bought by Apple so I switched back to Mac. After that I worked at a research lab and wrote lab software that ran under OS X.
Now my job is once again developing Windows desktop software. When I got this job I convinced my employer to buy me a 5k iMac and Parallels. So I run Visual Studio under Parallels but all my other tools run under macOS.
My preference, knowing what’s going on under the surface in both, is definitely for macOS. It’s a much better designed system, especially since it’s built on a Unix foundation. Indie developers who really care about software quality write software for macOS. Windows software seems clunky in comparison. I wish I could still be developing macOS software, but it’s not feasible in the manufacturing industry.
I will say, though, that Microsoft’s developer tools division is doing a great job these days. They are completely embracing standards and open source in stark contrast to their policies twenty years ago. I just had to do a bug fix using Visual Studio 6 from 1998 and it was like stepping back into medieval times.
@SSteve I don’t do that kind of development but I have in the past. Visual Studio is a nice tool and supports many different languages. You can write apps for desktops or phones with it too. But as far as I can remember, not OSX.
I had to use Solaris in a previous job so I did get to know that quite well. Haven’t been using it lately so I tried to use Raspbian recently and discovered how much of it I really did lose. It’s not like riding a bike where you never forget. Besides, all those Unix flavors seem to have developers that obfuscate their code probably to show their brilliance so it’s hard for me to figure out what is happening. Oh well, I’ll figure that stuff out if I need it again in the future.
I really liked Visual Studio 6 from the 90’s. I remember that it would allow you to create a self contained exe file. Seems they took that functionality away in later versions. It was so convenient if I wrote a utility for someone to simplify their job, I could hand them that exe and it would work. Now it has to be installed and many office environments don’t allow their employees to run install programs.
This has been my desktop for years. On my other computer (the one I use for my Etsy stuff), I change it up, but this one stays the same. I loves me some Iron Man.
sure, why not. this is my desktop desktop, where i’ve been doing some software updates and discovering that my machine is throwing hardware errors like nobody’s business. (hence the root shells.)
background is from the touhou project, which is. . . a series of simple games that grew into a media empire. i name all my (non-server) computers after characters from the games, and i don’t anticipate ever running out.
you can also see that i use windowmaker, an elegant windowing interface for a more civilized age.
@lifftchi I get the appeal of a tiling WM, and I get the appeal of a bigass default DE, and I get the appeal of a minimalist / aesthetic non-tiling WM…
@InnocuousFarmer Windowmaker, like, defines category 3 there. It also is just very good at window management. I can pretty easily keep track of something like 50 windows per desktop, using a combination of positioning, application grouping, and the window list when all else fails. Multiple window selection, so I can move and pin multiple windows at once. The dockapps are very convenient. It does almost everything I want and very little I don’t.
There are a few things that I’d like. I think early versions of expose are brilliant (Apple seems to make it less useful every release) and a decent GUI file browser that doesn’t expect to own your entire desktop would be nice too. Better multi-desktop support – my single biggest annoyance is that windows remember position, but not desktop, so I have to move them back manually, which is tedious. But overall it’s the least annoying UI that I’ve found. My memory is very positional – edit here, build here, run tests here, look up stuff here, chat here, and so on, so tiling managers are right out for me.
@lifftchi Interesting… the reason that tilers work better for me is because I have those strong spatial connections. Takes me far more effort to get stuff where it ‘belongs’ on a freeform WM vs. a tiler.
@lifftchi That’s interesting… I switch screens, operating systems, and resolutions too often to get a good positional scheme going. The one thing that is fairly constant is that I use virtual desktops heavily, and I generally put the same sets of windows on the same virtual desktops. The main exception is Windows, at work, where I’ve just got too many windwows open.
It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about window management features other than Alt-tab. I’d honestly forgotten that those kinds of things were available.
This is a NASA image of Pluto. It’s amazing that within my lifetime we went from not seeing the far side of the moon to being able to see landscape features and atmosphere on Pluto.
The other is from a scan I made in 2003 from my Grizzly bandsaw manual.
Here’s the work desktop. The first two are stock desktop images that come with macOS. The third is a photo I took.
There are more icons on my desktop than usual because I was creating a lot of temporary files while implementing a new feature in our software. They are about to get trashed.
@djslack Ha ha, I thought of posting my phone’s screen too. I think you’re the only one to do that. I love the Android OS due to it’s flexibility such as being able to side load apps, can hook up a standard USB cable, and can transfer any files I want to the phone without having to use special programs like iTunes.
Mine’s also quite boring. I like a tidy desktop, and never let anything stay there for very long. I do change my wallpaper pretty often as well, but here’s the current. I suppose I can post my desk, I rather like it, even though it’s not much to look at.
That hurts my eyes and brain.
@Moose I know they’re expensive… but it might be time to invest in some folders.
/giphy ew
I took that picture on one of our morning walks.
Boy there sure are a lot of critics and not a lot of desktops in here
@Moose Your desktop still stresses me out, like a lot.
@Moose I’m seeing Surgeon Simulator and SimplePlanes
@jbartus Yeah that was a fun time. If I remember right, the Surgeon Simulator was for a Periscope…
My home PC was just formatted last week, so it’s pretty much a fresh install. My Work PC has confidential info on it and I’d rather not start job hunting.
@lichme confidential on your desktop?!
@RiotDemon Pretty!
@earlyre I think they’re coming to see a Giants/Dodgers game. They are, of course, Dodgers fans.
@SSteve the image i REALLY wanted was a star destroyer over the Golden Gate. something akin to independence day, with a star destroyer in place of that ship.
but this was the closest i could find.
@earlyre I’m sure someone with Photoshop could help out. I don’t have Photoshop or I’d try.
@earlyre Hey, the Bay Bridge needs a little love, too. How do you think it feels sitting there in the shadow of the GG Bridge for 80 years?
@RiotDemon I just gave it a shot with Pixelmator, but my skills are not up to the task. Maybe if I had a few hours to spend.
@SSteve while that’s better than anything i could do, the shot i’m seeing in my head is taken from the Presidio…( you know, the future site of starfleet command…)
no, i’m not picky at all…
I have no problems giving love to the bay bridge. While I’ve never been out there, my mom was born in Oakland in early '46.( her folks were missionaries, they lived in Oakland(and were assigned a Church there) for a couple years towards the end of WWII, while studying Chinese language/culture (where they were heading) at Berkley.
@Pavlov Look at that phone! Takin’ old style!
@Pavlov That is the desktop I was thinking of at first in this thread - not the computer one.
@Pavlov Aw, home sweet home.
@Pavlov looks all too familiar le sigh
I don’t like clutter.
Desk for today. Changes often. Icons and placement essentially goes back to W2k.
I was standing on the hill just above my place when I took this. I am thinking of changing it to a new picture I took last night.
@ConAndLibrarian
Took this from my front door. I always find it super creepy.
@ConAndLibrarian Do you live in Pripyat?
@Moose They claim that they are just water towers, I am convinced that it something much more sinister is stored there.
My desk isn’t electronic.
I don’t know what half this stuff is and that malwarebytes thing is pissing me off. Someone other than me picks the background. It’s either a robot or a ghost so I don’t mess with it.
Jetta is featured at the moment…
Too many people already made this joke, but…
@spitfire6006006 non-joke version. I have a lot of wallpapers that just cycle every few minutes
No icons, just Corvettes.
This has been my preferred setup through the last several computers.
@PurplePawprints I’m not a super pro Photoshopper, but I may be able to extend that image to fit your screen size better if you’re interested!
@luvche21 Thank you for the offer, but I actually have that in several different sizes/ratios. (We also have a huge framed canvas print on our wall.) I prefer this one so that I have space for icons without really covering the picture. After posting this I realized I’d let it get messier than I like and removed a bunch of the icons so it’s cleaner looking now, too.
@PurplePawprints well, I’m glad someone else here is a fan of that series, it was incredible watching it the first time, now I need to convince my wife to watch it with me! Do you know if anywhere streams it?
@luvche21 I know you can watch for free on Amazon if you have prime. I think Hulu still has it, also. We re-watch it pretty frequently.
Oh; mine looks a bit boring:
@sligett no background photo?
@RiotDemon Right; just blank. I don’t see it very often; I didn’t remember what color it is. I was surprised when I saw it.
@sligett Left-side dock for life.
/me gets really nosy and zooms in on the icons.
@RiotDemon I do this every time, especially when people SS open browser windows with a bunch of tabs
Hella neat…
@brhfl Weird that doing a window-screenshot of the desktop on macOS just ignores the background image.
@elimanningface So cuuuuuute!
@elimanningface Where’s a club when you need one.
@sicc574 not cool.
My desktop is usually a nature scene, but right now I’m still besotted with Bright.
I have this Dark Skies series cycling on my desktop. Hard to see, but there are cows in a bunch of them.
At work, I took a photo of the view to post on the desktop. This isn’t the final version with the monitors in the monitors in the photo reflecting the same image.
@KDemo is that a 4x3 monitor?
@shawn - Uh - not sure, but if that is something special, I doubt it. The state doesn’t generally spring for great equipment.
@shawn Looks 5:4 me. The goto cheap monitor used to be 1280x1024, IIRC.
@KDemo ahhhhh this reminds me of a nice old view I used to have from an office in a previous job. Treeeeeees and naaaaaature!
@UncleVinny
Did you have distinct seasons? I made a different image for summer and fall, but missed a snowy version.
@KDemo No, but I’m a fan of this idea. I’d like to cycle my desktop images more often anyway, and making them semi-seasonal would be poetic, atmospheric, suave, etc.
I have this plan I’ve been fumbling around on for the kitchen, where I have a few wall spots that need decorations. My idea is to have a magnetic board that I can cover with seasonal paper, and on top of that tack up various ephemera. That way I’d get the seasonal variation, and also have more room for the sort of flim flam that currently chokes the front of my fridge. But my first idea (magnetic panels offa Amazon) was a fail… The magnetic surface wasn’t strong enough to hold things, even with strong Nd magnets as tacks, AND it was too heavy so it fell off the wall – I was using 3M sticky pads to hold it all up there. So now my plan is to get thin metal sheets and start with that as the base. Then my little Nd magnets will be strong enough, I think.
TMI, to be sure. TMI.
@UncleVinny - Not TMI, not at all!
You could just hang a refrigerator door on your wall?
(But it would take more than sticky pads, I think).
Yesterday, I did my periodic desktop cleaning at home where I create a folder named “desktop from <date>” (2018-01-09 in this case) and put all the icons that aren’t supposed to live on my desktop, plus the previous “desktop from <date>” folder into the current desktop from <date> folder.
My work desktop is similar, tho it has different icons and the background is Windows 2000 Blue instead of black. It is also not stretched across two monitors and hasn’t had the desktop cleaning thing done since early December.
My electronic desktop …
is tidier than my desktop irl.
This is a bit more cluttered than I prefer:
Pics from hikes in Utah
@crow Ooh! Arches National Park is one of my favorite places on Earth!
Depends on which virtual desktop. This is the one where most of my work-related windows usually go:
This image comes from one of the desktops I like, and is part of several rotating Ghibli images:
@InnocuousFarmer Yay, Howl!
@medz No nonsense!
@medz I hate that I can see enough of the contents of that folder to know that it is real.
@medz no snooping here.
@Moose oops. Forgot to pixelate that folder.
Nothing special here.
@cengland0 Do you use Mission Control or is it still in your Dock because you never got around to removing it?
@SSteve I don’t use mission control. Do you see that icon somewhere? If so, point it out and I’ll remove it so it will save dock space.
If I did need mission control, I just double tap on the magic mouse with two fingers. But my monitor is large enough that I can have several apps open without them overlapping. Even if I want more apps, I have a second virtual desktop that I access by swiping left and right on the magic mouse. This feature is handy if I’m using a virtual PC (VM Ware) in one window full screen and Mac programs too. I can switch between them but usually don’t need that feature.
@cengland0 Sorry, my mistake. I thought the rocket ship was Mission Control. It’s Launchpad. Do you use Launchpad?
I use Ctrl+Up-Arrow for Mission Control.
@SSteve I don’t use Launchpad either so I just removed it. Don’t know why I didn’t do it earlier, maybe laziness. I either click on the app from the doc or go through the apps folder. I don’t really see a need for the Launchpad.
You must be a Mac user too since you recognize those icons. How are you liking it? I do because I get the best of both worlds. I can run Mac or Windows apps at the same time.
If I run a Windows PC, I cannot run Mac software unless I run weird software like Hackintosh which isn’t really in Windows. I have so many options to run Windows on the Mac using Boot Camp, VMWare, Parallels, Wine, etc.
@cengland0 I’ve used and developed for both Mac and Windows (and DOS) for 30 years. I bought a Mac Plus in 1986 but developed software for Windows 3.1 in the 90s. In the early 00s the company I worked for got bought by Apple so I switched back to Mac. After that I worked at a research lab and wrote lab software that ran under OS X.
Now my job is once again developing Windows desktop software. When I got this job I convinced my employer to buy me a 5k iMac and Parallels. So I run Visual Studio under Parallels but all my other tools run under macOS.
My preference, knowing what’s going on under the surface in both, is definitely for macOS. It’s a much better designed system, especially since it’s built on a Unix foundation. Indie developers who really care about software quality write software for macOS. Windows software seems clunky in comparison. I wish I could still be developing macOS software, but it’s not feasible in the manufacturing industry.
I will say, though, that Microsoft’s developer tools division is doing a great job these days. They are completely embracing standards and open source in stark contrast to their policies twenty years ago. I just had to do a bug fix using Visual Studio 6 from 1998 and it was like stepping back into medieval times.
@SSteve I don’t do that kind of development but I have in the past. Visual Studio is a nice tool and supports many different languages. You can write apps for desktops or phones with it too. But as far as I can remember, not OSX.
I had to use Solaris in a previous job so I did get to know that quite well. Haven’t been using it lately so I tried to use Raspbian recently and discovered how much of it I really did lose. It’s not like riding a bike where you never forget. Besides, all those Unix flavors seem to have developers that obfuscate their code probably to show their brilliance so it’s hard for me to figure out what is happening. Oh well, I’ll figure that stuff out if I need it again in the future.
I really liked Visual Studio 6 from the 90’s. I remember that it would allow you to create a self contained exe file. Seems they took that functionality away in later versions. It was so convenient if I wrote a utility for someone to simplify their job, I could hand them that exe and it would work. Now it has to be installed and many office environments don’t allow their employees to run install programs.
External monitor on the left, laptop on the right.
From a peak above where I live now. Super lame hike until the awesome view at the top. I think this was 19 vertical shots stitched together.
Better view here (since it’s a dual monitor setup…): https://i.imgur.com/JWdTwS9
Grow house
@bolligra Dude. Sweet.
My rotating crop of desktop images is oooooold, but none of them are bad.
Virginia Beach
@mfladd nice! i lived there all through high school.
@mfladd can’t see your photo… and I used to live near Virginia Beach and so wanted too… sigh
This has been my desktop for years. On my other computer (the one I use for my Etsy stuff), I change it up, but this one stays the same. I loves me some Iron Man.
sure, why not. this is my desktop desktop, where i’ve been doing some software updates and discovering that my machine is throwing hardware errors like nobody’s business. (hence the root shells.)
background is from the touhou project, which is. . . a series of simple games that grew into a media empire. i name all my (non-server) computers after characters from the games, and i don’t anticipate ever running out.
you can also see that i use windowmaker, an elegant windowing interface for a more civilized age.
@lifftchi No such thing as an elegant wm that isn’t tiling…
Mostly kidding - that does look pretty clean. But on the rare occasion I’m not just on the command line, I definitely prefer a tiler.
@lifftchi I get the appeal of a tiling WM, and I get the appeal of a bigass default DE, and I get the appeal of a minimalist / aesthetic non-tiling WM…
Why do you like windowmaker?
@InnocuousFarmer Windowmaker, like, defines category 3 there. It also is just very good at window management. I can pretty easily keep track of something like 50 windows per desktop, using a combination of positioning, application grouping, and the window list when all else fails. Multiple window selection, so I can move and pin multiple windows at once. The dockapps are very convenient. It does almost everything I want and very little I don’t.
There are a few things that I’d like. I think early versions of expose are brilliant (Apple seems to make it less useful every release) and a decent GUI file browser that doesn’t expect to own your entire desktop would be nice too. Better multi-desktop support – my single biggest annoyance is that windows remember position, but not desktop, so I have to move them back manually, which is tedious. But overall it’s the least annoying UI that I’ve found. My memory is very positional – edit here, build here, run tests here, look up stuff here, chat here, and so on, so tiling managers are right out for me.
@lifftchi Interesting… the reason that tilers work better for me is because I have those strong spatial connections. Takes me far more effort to get stuff where it ‘belongs’ on a freeform WM vs. a tiler.
@lifftchi That’s interesting… I switch screens, operating systems, and resolutions too often to get a good positional scheme going. The one thing that is fairly constant is that I use virtual desktops heavily, and I generally put the same sets of windows on the same virtual desktops. The main exception is Windows, at work, where I’ve just got too many windwows open.
It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about window management features other than Alt-tab. I’d honestly forgotten that those kinds of things were available.
@rtjhnstn PCLOS with a LXDE desktop
This is a NASA image of Pluto. It’s amazing that within my lifetime we went from not seeing the far side of the moon to being able to see landscape features and atmosphere on Pluto.
The other is from a scan I made in 2003 from my Grizzly bandsaw manual.
Here’s the work desktop. The first two are stock desktop images that come with macOS. The third is a photo I took.
There are more icons on my desktop than usual because I was creating a lot of temporary files while implementing a new feature in our software. They are about to get trashed.
Should this be a monthly post?
@djslack Ha ha, I thought of posting my phone’s screen too. I think you’re the only one to do that. I love the Android OS due to it’s flexibility such as being able to side load apps, can hook up a standard USB cable, and can transfer any files I want to the phone without having to use special programs like iTunes.
Here’s mine:
Almost like my old phone, RIP. My old clock and icons were neon colored.
the background rotates every few minutes, but here’s the current one.
@carl669 this person is just sleeping, right?
@elimanningface yes. sleeping. mmm hmm…
@carl669 Office 2010, rocking it old school. Good for you!
Mine’s also quite boring. I like a tidy desktop, and never let anything stay there for very long. I do change my wallpaper pretty often as well, but here’s the current. I suppose I can post my desk, I rather like it, even though it’s not much to look at.
@MagnaVis I love that photo. The first time I saw it, I wondered if I could recreate it as an art piece.
@RiotDemon I’ve wanted to try and make my own, it’s so perfect for me right now, and I often come back to it.