Microsoft shot real lasers through a window to make Windows 10's wallpaper — surprisingly the iconic art wasn't computer generated

Xatolos@reddthat.com to Technology@lemmy.world – 476 points –
Microsoft shot real lasers through a window to make Windows 10's wallpaper — surprisingly the iconic art wasn't computer generated
tomshardware.com
48

And then put it into an os that sloppily compresses its wallpapers before displaying them

this pisses me off so much. You can set an HDR wallpaper too, but only if you insert a special file into its place to trick Windows into working properly

Oh this unlocked a memory of the hassle I went through trying to get rid of jpeg artifacts on my wallpaper on windows 7. It really pissed me off.

You remind me of something different but related. I noticed in Windows 98 that it would store a different setting for BMP wallpapers. And BMP wallpapers would also load in faster. So when you first set a BMP wallpaper, and then change it to a JPEG, it would remembrr both of threm. And it will still briefly display the BMP one on startup before it loads the JPEG one.

The compression artifacts always led me to believe it was computer generated.

Literally why would it do that

It was written 25 years ago and untouched since probably.

Yes but why? Is it so less data can be stored on disk because compressing raster files absolutely does not make them easier to display.

Somebody told me that they always use a tiled wallpaper to preserve memory, once.

They were sort of an advanced user in the 90s, but haven't done much computer or engineering related work since then.

If we consider what machines Windows 95 ran on - not even that stupid. Back then.

It's kinda weird how much of a performance difference the wallpaper makes. I once installed Linux mint on an old laptop and the perf of managing windows and some other things was terrible until I changed the wallpaper to a plain color.

Meanwhile windows will still lag switching between desktops if they have different wallpapers, even on high end computers

After using Linux for a while all the window animations of windows start to look jarring too

Kinda weird to think this will be the last version of Windows I use.

I mean they fucking advertised it as such when I bought it

Oh man I forgot about that!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service

Remember all those great updates to windows 10 that brought cool new features such as... Yeah, I don't either.

WSL maybe? Kinda funny that a major feature is literally just the ability to use linux within windows.

Didn't they recently remove that? Or make it much harder to access?

Not sure about the future of WSL, but WSA (android) has been discontinued.

It's not really a suprise seeing as they partnered with Amazon for the app store, no side load support and as far as I know they didn't really mention it anywhere in the actuall OS, so few knew about it.

(Oh and when I tried it, getting it to work for just one app took way more effort than it should have)

Quite a cool wallpaper. Makes me why they decided not to include it anymore.

Ngl, I genuinely find the Windows 11 wallpaper (which is not what this article is about) very beautiful.

I like the one that looks like Pringles, yum

I guess I'll be missing out for the rest of my life

Never knew and that's how spot on Mr. GMUNK had it, very impressed. Only saw it a gazillion.5 times so I never really had a chance.

And it's still worse than a picture of a hill in Sonoma

That's okay, if you want a quick nostalgia trip, just open one of the many control panels. Use the one according to the Windows era you want.

Did they do it for the light version too?

I think the newer wallpaper is artificial.

This wallpaper isn't default anymore since a few years back.

That wasn't the question.

Iirc the "light mode" wallpaper they are referring to is the newer one.

When windows 10 came out it only had this one and it is no longer default.

Meanwhile we're shooting penguins with lasers for our wallpapers...

I've used Ubuntu for a while a couple of years ago, and honestly, for daily usage and some light editing worked quite well. The gaming was an issue back then, but since i've brought a Steam Deck, i've stopped bothering playing games on windows anyway. Right now I'm looking around for others Linux disto. I've just installed Fedora on a 10 year old laptop and for now it works like a charm.