Simple fixes for Big Sur’s menu bar

Looking for something to do, I updated my Mac to Big Sur yesterday. All seems well. But I take exception to the newly transparent menu bar. I like a dark wallpaper for the desktop, but a dark menu bar is too severe for my taste.

One fix: In System Preferences, go to Accessibility and check Reduce transparency. The wallpaper will no longer show through.

Another (inspired, I’d say) fix, from Mac user Railgun: Create a dark wallpaper with a lighter line across the top. For my MacBook Air (2880 × 1800), I made a 44-pixel light-gray line across the top of my preferred wallpaper (this one). I doubled Railgun’s 22 pixels to take my Mac’s Retina display into account.

There’s a more complicated fix that uses the Terminal, ChangeMenuBarColor, but it’s beyond my ability, or courage. Your ability or courage may vary.

The strange thing about Big Sur: its drop-down menus remind me so much of the ultra-minimalist, highly tweaked Windows 95 setup I used on a university computer all those years ago. Back to the future.