Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

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.

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consumer451 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I guess this isn't a "desktop," but C64 background appears to be RGB (64, 50, 133). That was the color of my early childhood.

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colinhb 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some overlooked iconic backgrounds/color-schemes for me:

NeXTSTEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...

Plan9/Rio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/media/F...

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danirod 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One nerdy detail about old operating systems and graphics cards: due to the way the VGA color palette works, the teal background used in Windows 98 and earlier versions of Windows was actually lighter than #008080 if the computer was configured to use 16 colors (not 256 colors):

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.

	▲	accrual an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I always liked the feeling of getting a proper video driver installed and unlocking "true color" support, the desktop background and icons were suddenly much richer and saturated.
	▲	vlowrian 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		That's cool, thanks for sharing. I like the idea of adding XP as an anniversary gift ;)
	▲	millerm 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I remember that good feeling when getting a new windows 9x machine up and running or installing a new video card, updating the graphics driver to get the display into 16M colors, and enjoying the darker teal. The color itself felt like an upgrade. When that brighter teal appeared you knew you didn't have the driver set, even before seeing any icons. 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.

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flowercalled 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can understand using an llm to build your website. But I can't understand using it to write copy, especially when it's so unnecessary here.

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rideontime 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Seconded. The "personality" it tries to add is trite and tiresome and everybody immediately sees it for what it is, especially for a case like this where there's only so many ways to say "this is the default desktop color of an operating system." Not only that, but it's confusing - is "Windows Classic blue" a real thing, or just an attempt at a cute phrase? Just label the colors and be done with it.

	▲	vlowrian 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's actually not so easy to pick a speaking name for each color, since many colors are used in different OSs. I tried to use neutral and standard color names were they exist. Things like Windows Classic blue are probably always description-slop, though. 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.

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vlowrian 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Agreed. A bit of context on that: I wanted to add some fun facts or relevant information to some of the colors, OSs, etc. and I wrote this in German and let the LLM do the translation. However,it looked pretty weird when navigating through the page and most colors and roughly half of the OSs did show up with an empty label. So it was a visual decision to let the LLM fill in the gaps.

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.

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cimi_ 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I like the website, great work!

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)?

	▲	vlowrian 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's actually a pretty cool idea, noted. Thanks!

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torh 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My favorite was the blue in Windows 2000. Never cared much for the green in Windows 95/98. When installing Windows 98 later (because games) I would try to set up the same blue. Instead of getting it correct, I guessed, and ended up with #336699 which was easy to remember and "close enough". I see now that it's closer to Haiku (almost perfect, #336698) than Windows 2000.

	▲	cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Same. The lighter gray 2000 uses compared to 9x is also much more pleasant. 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.

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summermusic an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When I was just getting into Linux and trying out all the random window managers, I found that I really liked the hues of green and purple that Blackbox came with.

	▲	vlowrian an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I agree, Blackbox is still one of the WMs on my wishlist.

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scrumper 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Huh, I do not remember Windows 1.0 being that shade of green but screenshots confirm what's here.

	▲	Narishma an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It probably looked much less neon bright on the displays of the time. Same for Windows 2.0.

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voodooEntity 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No os² feel like this list should have gotten more entries and love before publishing

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cryo32 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is great. I've been meaning to work out what windows NT background colour is for years. My desktop now is solid that :)

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drybjed 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

First I looked for was Atari 1040 STE TOS green background, and it's not there. Bummer.

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tuzemec 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For the past 20+ years I'm using the same desktop color across various OSes: #000000 This is one of the first things that I modify on a fresh install.

	▲	HelloUsername 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Funny thing: "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

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_joel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's strange how seeing the default NT4 and 2k colours take me straight back to a fresh install 25+ years ago. First job was doing desktop rollouts so I'd see it a lot!

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lucideer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Windows 2008 is the teal desktop I remember fondly - they brought it back after going blue in Windows 2003. I'm presuming it was the same #008080 shade as '95 & '98.

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zebproj 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's no "Hot Dog Stand", so the collection is incomplete.

	▲	vlowrian 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is :) https://desktopcolors.com/os/windows-3-1/ffff00

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wewewedxfgdf 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I still love the Amiga colors.

	▲	vlowrian 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Me too! The Workbench Blue is actually my current desktop background :)

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vivid242 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I sometimes catch myself recreating the Win95 color on my Mac. Thanks for this!

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newsomix9xl 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Where's plan9?

	▲	rzzzt 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly!

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rcarmo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Delightful, even if I don’t recall Solaris

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iAMkenough 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OS X Aqua Blue!

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imfemambocus 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The one thing I would add to each swatch is where the number came from. A value read out of a palette table and a value sampled from a screenshot are not the same number, and the difference is invisible.

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.