I’m perhaps not typical, but I’m picky about my desktop wallpaper. It has to look clean and professional; photos of friends or family are horrible backgrounds. It has to be a native size, not stretched. It has to be non-distracting, because I don’t keep windows maximized. But after a couple weeks of sitting behind all my apps and never really being appreciated, I lose interest and want something nice.

Here are a handful of great wallpaper sites. Note that, although I’m not linking to anything racy, wallpaper sites tend to have NSFW images added a lot. Most of the links are good at keeping them walled off, but you perhaps shouldn’t browse these if you’re at a place where you could get in trouble for an image that slipped by a filter somewhere.

• DeviantArt’s Wallpaper section. They vary greatly in quality.
• WallCoo. This is the English version of a Chinese site. If you’re okay with not understanding anything — of if you’re fluent in Chinese — the Chinese version seems to have different content.
• Stock photography site Crestock sometimes posts free wallpapers that are high in quality.
• There’s a Flickr group called Wallpaper and Backgrounds. (Protip: search for something like “hdr,” “macro,” or “bokeh”)