It's all about how you use it. With a generic driver like OpenRGB, it might be easier to make the RGB blinkenlights on your hardware respond to stuff you might want to monitor in the background but not distract too much from whatever is being displayed on your screen. System load, temperatures, notifications (e.g. incoming mail), whatever you think is best.
They're fun! Something about soft pulsing colors is just...nice. Properly diffused, they go well with art, to accent rooms, etc.
I've never seen them used inside of a PC, though, which made this project page a bit confusing. Is that a thing now? Because that does sound like a garish and distracting place for them.
Case/component lighting has been a thing for at least 20 years. 20 years ago it was cold cathode tubes lighting your case. For about the past 10 years RGB lighting has pretty hard to avoid if you wanted to build your own PC.
It's not just kids who like RGB lighting. I know a few people in their late 30s and early 40s that love the colorful effects.
Personally I do like lighting, but I want static colors. The great thing about RGB lighting is that I can choose whatever color I want. Much better than when the choices were basically just red or blue and you had to commit to one when you bought it.
My EKWB AIO is the worst for that. It has standard addressable RGB to control the lighting, but the default when that's not plugged in is to do the rainbow cycling. The default for all disconnected lighting should be no lights!
Or at least some reasonable default. I understand that the device wants to do a show off. I have a gigabyte GPU which I can’t control from my Gigabyte BIOS. It can only control the fans. If I turn off the lights from the BIOS sometimes the GPU also reacts to that. And Sometimes one of the LEDs turns on red. The RAM is uncontrollable except when in windows. So at the moment I boot into windows and then soft reboot into Linux to have all lights turned off. Obviously not what I initially wanted.
But what kills me the most is the fact that the RGB Lightshow from RAM keeps running even when I put the system to sleep!
It can be for sure. I've built a few PCs with tasteful (relative to a crowd, I'm sure) RGB lighting. This is my current one where the doors and other glass surfaces are tinted to reduce outgoing light, and the lighting is static: https://imgur.com/gallery/U2KZD07
It seems a lot of the marketing for PC cases and hardware is targeted at young teenage boys 10-16. I wanted to buy a computer case for my mom, and I couldn't find an affordable one without a window on the side.
IMO it can look nice if it's done subtly. I definitely don't want fast animated LEDs on my computer, I think that would just make it harder to concentrate.
> I wanted to buy a computer case for my mom, and I couldn't find an affordable one without a window on the side.
I had the same problem when I went to upgrade my server chassis. Fortunately the side panels on the chassis I settled for were interchangeable so I could swap the glass around to the rear facing side and hide it.
I think that my PC case is pretty tasteful and not targeted towards pizza-faced adolescents. It's not completely enclosed though, the sides are dark mesh. I luckily have very little RGB that shows through it.
Most appealing setups with RGB lighting only use a single color unlike how they are usually advertised. Browsing https://www.reddit.com/r/battlestations/ should give a good idea of what people are doing with RGB lighting in the wild.
It just seems garish to me. I also imagine it must be quite distracting to have a bunch of lights flashing out of your PC.