Oh, these are great. I just wish they would have included Quantum Foam, which was very similar to the Cheetah and Puma one, but in graphite gray and with more contrast in the highlights. I think it was the default in Mac OS 9.
It’s been very hard to find in decent resolution and quality. I’ve tried to use various upscaling tools, I’ve tried to do it manually (reconstructing it with vectors), but I’ve never been quite happy with the result.
One of the things I hated about clean installing OSX was the previous wallpapers and user avatars weren't kept in the installer. If you were lucky enough to upgrade the OS without errors through each major release you got to hang onto some very important bits of the OS, like Quicktime 7, iPhoto, iMovie. Once you upgraded the hardware, if you didn't have the foresight to backup the application and the app support library folder, you were in for a letdown.
It's the same with iOS too - I've kept the milky way over a snowy mountain top since whatever version it was released because if you change it you lose it (well you have to search around and get it back from the internet).
OS X 10.7 is still my favorite default wallpaper. I was surprised to see the author didn't care for it. Given the minimal descriptions for 10.10+, I take it they care more for the abstract blue backgrounds of the earlier releases than for mountains as well.
It works wonderfully for me at least, for one counter anecdata. It only works well because I can swipe back and forth between screens with the touchpad. I don’t know how I would use a mac without one.
To me the full screen feature is really useful. I work with my notebook in a stand right by the side of an external display. On the notebook I keep everything in full screen mode except for the VS Code windows, which stay in the other monitor. When I need to switch from browser to Slack, Spark (email client) or Spotify, I just have to swipe with two fingers on my Magic Mouse or with four fingers in MacBook's Magic Trackapd.
TotalSpaces 2 gives you a 2-d desktop grid again! Unfortunately it also requires disabling (parts of) System Integrity Protection because of the way it interacts with the Dock.
Well then say that MacOS is 3 pixels slimmer than Mac OS but it just doesn't have the same feel and I'm constanly get crumbs stuck between the c and the O.
I personally just say Mac OS. If there were some device called the Blarg, with an operating system built to run just on the Blarg, then that operating system would be most naturally called Blarg OS; I suspect the vast majority of people would call it that if no name were supplied.
It's kind of a shame that the thumbnails are 1400x1050. I mean, it's a thumbnail, ~500p would be absolutely fine (probably even less), and the load times would have been much better.
Are there similar libraries for the non-default but also-included wallpapers? I think I liked some of the alternative El Capitan wallpapers more than the default.
As someone who is probably more supportive of intellectual property rights and copyright in particular than the median HN user, "how dare someone nostalgically resize and make available a handful of background wallpapers that were distributed with obsolete versions of an operating system" strikes me as one of the tiniest, most pedantic hills to die on I can imagine.
I take it you've never paid for food and rent from the income from your photographs.
I don't know the copyright story of the photos included with the macOS releases, but I don't think it's wrong for the parent comment to at least ask the question.
I appreciate you getting huffy at me in the ostensible defense of photographers and art creators (seriously, I do), but the only way these creators could possibly be losing potential income from this site is if retained the rights to sell these images digitally. I can't swear under oath that they didn't, but under this particular circumstance, that would be awfully unusual. (It would be almost unheard of these works to have been licensed to Apple on a per-unit royalty basis rather than a flat fee, but in either case the creator would have made all the money they ever would have from Apple by now anyway. And, it's quite likely these were done either under a work-for-hire contract, in which Apple retained all the rights, or -- like "Bliss," the iconic green hill/blue sky image in Windows 95 -- they bought all the rights to the image for a flat fee.)
It's also worth noting that OS X has been free as in beer since at least 10.9, and it looks like 10.1 was also free if you had 10.0.
For all intents and purposes, these wallpapers are free to the end user. Additionally, resold versions of the OS also have a cost approaching 0. Finally, the marketplace for resold wallpapers that were effectively free to the end user is nonexistent. Though there may still be interesting legal questions here, as you point out, the creators of the wallpapers almost certainly retain no rights anyway.
The point isn't that the photographers don't have rights to these particular photos.
The point is you criticize a person for even asking the question.
Not everyone has the same insight into the licensing and legal ramifications of images being distributed with OSes, and there's never a reason to be condescending and demeaning to someone asking a simple question.
You could have chosen to educate them in a helpful and friendly way, but you didn't.
You're absolutely right that my reply wasn't the friendlies way to go about things. I bit back to the original comment, and I shouldn't have done that.
The original comment I was responding to was, in its entirety:
"Whatever happened to copyright..."
And I'm gonna be honest: to me, that is not just asking an innocent question in a friendly and non-confrontational way. It's implicitly pretty accusatory.
It’s been very hard to find in decent resolution and quality. I’ve tried to use various upscaling tools, I’ve tried to do it manually (reconstructing it with vectors), but I’ve never been quite happy with the result.