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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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