Daru wrote:
For the same reason people put effort into painting the walls of their house, or putting in some new flooring, or cleaning out that giant pile of papers on a desk. Yes, if you're staring at the color of your wall you're probably doing nothing, but you always see it so you might as well make it look nice.
That's not to say wallpapers that people spend time on look nice, but they're at least not 24x16 jpg's compressed to hell then tiled across an HD 1080 monitor.
Those are different cases.
When you are busy working, you don't
cover your walls. You look away from them. (Unless you're working with the walls or whatever.)
Walls provide ambient aesthetics and affect emotions because of this. Same with lighting and scent. Your desktop image only shines through parts of your monitor of at all.
Now, if you decorate your desktop with a thousand little utilities, that's fine. Just imagine ten clocks, thermometers, barometers, voltmeters, sound meters, Wi-Fi detectors, etc. on your real wall. Kinda stupid isn't it?
Are huge
walls of text really helpful? Do you really need to minimize everything to access your music player? Why not just click the damn icon or bind keyboard keys, or use a remote?
I put about an hour (at most) of effort into every desktop background I make. I often tweak things after using it because e.g. the part behind the task bar or behind title bars is ugly and distracting.
I wasn't trying to make it sound like desktop images are a wasted effort. I just see flaws in a workflow which requires you to interact with your desktop.
TL;DR I'm hungry.