What are the 10 best desktop wallpapers ever?

The humble desktop wallpaper, an escapist's portal that lets you dream about faraway places, personalise a mundane object and brighten up your life, or is it just an annoying feature that makes you question the sanity of your fellow co-workers?

If you're a wallpaper fanatic, we want to know what you think are the ten best desktop backgrounds of all time. Since it's a really subjective topic, we're leaving it up to you to tell us which ones get you hot under the collar.

We have, however, put together ten of our favourite default desktop backgrounds to start the ball rolling. These straight-out-of-the-box wallpapers might be standard images that don't hold any creative merits -- but you've got to start somewhere.

First up, behold the classic Macintosh System 1.1 wallpaper, a mosaic of alternating black and white pixels that gives a grey cast to the screen. This wallpaper is an early representation of Apple's simple and straightforward ethos.

Most of the images in this article, other than the Ubuntu and Vista screenshots, were sourced from guidebookgallery.org. -Andrew Lim