Desktopcolors.com
A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
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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.
HN · launched Aug 17, 2026 · 166 upvotes (top 4%) · 0 views
Niche: design inspiration galleries · 60 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -78% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 60 launches in design inspiration galleries →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a static content website/archive cataloging historical OS background hex colors, which can easily be built with Astro or plain HTML/CSS in hours.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: stylespark.dev, Virtual OS Museum, PCJs Machines
Concerns raised: Color accuracy dependent on hardware (video adapters, CRTs), Screenshots introduce color drift vs original OS values, Plan9/Rio unavailable in reliable sources
Feature requests: Tooltips when hovering over dots in Known Uses section, Clickable dots to show OS details, Filter by color to see which OSes shared a given color, Add CDE (late 90s) color scheme, Add Sun OpenWindows (1995) gray on mottled gray
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 187 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #7 of 188 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 287 days after the earliest competitor.
- Solid Wallpapers · ph · 2026-10-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Explore color palettes inspired by 3000 master painter artworks · hn · 2026-05-05 · 215 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Color template website · ph · 2026-11-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Wallpaper-Collection · github · 2026-10-19 · 29 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Logoshots · ph · 2026-10-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- The Color Sheet · ph · 2026-11-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- ColorPause · ph · 2026-11-05 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- New Parts for Old Computers · hn · 2026-08-03 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.42
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.