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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.

It's funny to see this: after avoiding the Windows world for the last 25 years, back in the corporate world in the last few, I see this pattern with Microsoft tools all the time.

Teams not loading due to security issues, but notifications coming through with full content of messages. Ability to type a handful of words in cloud version of Word (or paste full documents) before security check catches up and requires me to set up a sensitivity label. Etc.

It mostly tells me about MS doing very bad software architecture for web apps, though apparently the desktop apps are not immune to it either.

This relates to something that might have started around that time: The practice of displaying the splash screen for a finite time period, then showing the user environment before the software was fully started. It was suspected that both OS's and apps were doing this, because people notice when "the app takes too long to load."

Now you have to guess whether the software has really loaded or not before you start using it.

> Also, I tend to stick with default configurations because it makes bug filing easier.

I've learned to use default configurations pretty much everywhere. It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations, so it's easiest to just not care. The exception is my ~50 lines of VS Code settings I have sync'd in a mysterious file somewhere that I've never seen, presumably on github's servers, but not anywhere I can see?

“Comfort food”. That’s so funny. I still use motif window manager with steelblue4 desktop and wheat xterm background since aix into Linux. That was my first default in 1989 college and nothing has improved since. (Gnome, kde and the like make me want to upchuck).

Many, many years ago, when I still used Windows recreationally, I used to edit the value of a specific Windows registry key, replacing "explorer.exe" with "cmd.exe". This would prevent Windows from runningg explorer.exe and launching the "desktop" with wallpaper, icons, etc. This produced what seemed more like a UNIX window manager, a solid backgground, where each window is a Microsoft cmd.exe shell, a classic Windows black box with a blue bar across the top and thin grey borders. I could then launch applications, such as the ones in the C:\windows\system32 folder from a command prompt, e.g., taskmgr.exe. For me, this made Windows feel much faster and more robust that when using explorer.exe. Certainly it was lighter weight.

More recently, long after I stopped using Windows but still many years ago, I was reading an article about Arthur Whitney. It had a photo which seemd to be at home, maybe in a furnished garage, and in the background was a desktop computer running Windows. The only window open was a cmd.exe. I am not suggesting anything. It is just something I always remember.

Perusing some recent Microsoft documentation I noticed this:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/shel...

To me, this falls in the category of bugs I think of as "systemic bugs" or "type bugs". If login components were passed a token, then you could make the token's destructor automatically flag that the process is done. Then this bug would be more-or-less impossible to write.

Because they made it a runtime thing - "components just have to remember to do this", the code structure itself affords this bug.

There was a similar bug at facebook years ago where the user's notification count would say you had notifications - and you click it, and there aren't any notifications. The count was updated by a different code path than the code which inserted notifications in the list, and they got out of sync. They changed the code so both the notification count & list were managed by the same part of the system, and the all instances of the bug went away forever.

The code in question reminds me a lot of my favorite Kubernetes bug:

  if (request.authenticationData) {
    ok := validate(etc);
    if (!ok) {
      return authenticationFailure;
    }
  }

Turns out the same meme spans decades.

A bit meta, but I've come to look forward to the "Why did <bizarre behaviour> happen with <windows version>" headlines that herald a Raymond Chen post. These are always fascinating.

Offtopic I really liked the auto-refreshing "Windows Spotlight" wallpaper on logon screen. I even wrote a script to sync it as my desktop wallpaper.

But on my Win10 it stopped working idk why, so I wrote a script to download Bing Image of the Day instead: https://blog.est.im/2025/stdout-03

This is the kind of problem that can be prevented by using "better" coding patterns. Not to say it will be prevented, but that some ways people like to structure code are more prone to these kinds of bugs. I quoted the word "better" because I work with a competent but less experienced guy that tends to write more complex code, or what some claim is just a different style than I would prefer. I make claims that "this way is better" and it's often very difficult to articulate why it's better. Sometimes I am convincing, other times not... I'm not immune to these kinds of bugs either, but I shudder to think I might one day inherit this other guys code and a collection of these weird bugs.

Great read. Raymond Chen's blog is absolutely legendary.

When I think about it, if I hadn't lived this time, I would find it pretty hard to believe we had full-featured desktop environments in machines with paltry 8MB of memory and 50Mhz CPUs, and not only that, but we even indulged in the luxury of having bitmaps as wallpapers.

Machines were often so slow back then, 30 second logins were 'normal' (or maybe even quick), especially once you load a bunch of crap like AV and other enterprise crap.

If I had dollar for every minute of my life I spent troubleshooting random group policy quirks during my previous life as a sysadmin...

> Personally, I use a solid color background. It was the default in Windows 95,¹ and I’ve stuck with that bluish-green background color ever since.

My thoughts exactly, but I think it goes back to the Mac LC's we used in a school computer lab, and the palette of colors you could have with 16-bit graphics was so vast compared to the 16 color PC's I was used to.

Plus, you always have so much stuff open you're never going to see your wallpaper anyway. That's what screensaver are (were) for that rotate through a folder full of images.

I've noticed a current problem in Win 11 where if you start your PC with the monitor off, let it get to the login screen, then turn the monitor on, you get a terribly low-res version of your login window background. I suspect it's taking some fallback default resolution like 800x600 and serving up an "optimised" version of the background for that res, then not updating it.

I've spent a few hours reading and installing random software I never heard of before to get my windows machine into the basic state of "I can boot it without getting heavily triggered"

- Half of each boot time was wasted for a copilot 360 dialog. On every fucking boot, no copilot no office installed. Or rather copilot installed itself without notice and started to spam me

- In several places the OS would show me "news" like death messages, war updates and economy details. Definitely far from a productive environment and honestly heavily triggering, I don't read news anywhere but my PC is full of it and there is no option to disable? What about kids?

- I have updates or a broken system about every second time I boot the PC. I know it's because I just cut the power, but I hate when it asks 3 times if I want to actually shut down (and then still breaks it, or never actually shuts down)

- I constantly end up in a variety of login screens that want me to login to an Microsoft account I don't have and want

- There are soooo many ads. I've been on Linux for years, instead of traditional TV I almost always stream with ad blocker. The country I live in isn't plastered with Ads either. But this shithole of operating system is. It literally pops up ad notification above apps on default.

If anyone wonders most problems where solved with "ShutUp10" others with chatGpt and regedit. It was actually pretty hard when you have no idea about this OS and it's dark patterns.

On my Linux machines I don't even change the wallpaper, but windows defaults are unbearable and upright productivity killers

This is the kind of thing that leads technical folks like me to do absurd things, like creating a 1x1 pixel jpg/png of the color they want just to be put into the normal-and-thus-tested-and-maintained parts of code.

On my Windows 10 work machine, solid color backgrounds sometimes get reset to black after connecting to it via RDP. I "fixed" it by creating a solid color .png and using it as a background picture ...

This is a structural problem in the code. The passed in handle to `DesktopIconsReady` should auto Report as soon as it's dropped. That completely obviates any of the problems of conditional logic.

If-Then Considered Harmful.

Seeing how that complicated if-then logic is just too stiff a challenge to your average developer, we should probably just dispense with it.

Or why your software should never use arbitrary timeouts. Without the 30s timeout this bug would have been caught and fixed before release.

I use a picture with a solid color because with pictures the text under the icons is white with a black shadow. The "Solid color" option (instead of "Picture") chooses either white or black font color and there is no shadow and I don't like it.

Load curtains can be pretty annoying if you handle them like this.

One pattern I've had success with is using handles they need to be returned. If you never grab a handle you don't have to worry about returning it. Seems to work better than the fire and wait for side effects approach.

I really love the last paragraph. I tell this to people fiddling with their system all the time.

Typical response is "Well it should just work anyway!". Which is theoretically true -- the worst kind of true.

As a software developer, I’ve occasionally felt ashamed when it takes me hours—or even days—to fix a stubborn bug. But whenever I see that even big tech companies struggle with similar issues, I regain confidence in myself. After all, this is what being a software engineer often looks like: wrestling with unpredictable behavior until something finally clicks.

Just yesterday, I ran into a bizarre bug on Windows where the mouse cursor would move every time I pressed the arrow keys—almost like I was controlling the mouse with the keyboard. It drove me nuts. I checked all the usual mouse and keyboard settings, but everything looked normal. At one point, I even wondered if my machine had been infected by a virus.

Desperate, I Googled "mouse pointer moving on arrow keys". The first result had only one answer, which blamed... Microsoft Paint. I was skeptical—Paint? Really? That couldn’t possibly be it. Still, with no other leads, I gave it a shot. As it turned out, I did have Paint open in another Desktop View, where I’d been cropping a screenshot. The moment I closed it, the problem vanished. Instantly.

I still can’t believe that was the cause—and I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, even though no one was around to see it.

_____________________

1. https://superuser.com/questions/1467313/mouse-pointer-moving...

I could swear that this also affected Windows 10...

You guys see your desktop background?