‘Revamped’ default wallpaper coming to Ubuntu 10.10

By , Published September 3, 2010

Users concerend about the appearance of the current default wallpaper in Ubuntu 10.10 beta may be pleased to hear, from Mark Shuttleworth no less, that a ‘revamped’ default wallpaper is being made in light of user feedback.

The original plan for Maverick’s desktop wallpaper was, in Mark’s words: -

To make the desktop have a unique style, but be personal to every different PC. In essence, the wallpaper for the Lucid->12.04 series is a symphony of light and light-related effects, and we want to make it so every day, each of those lights and effects moves just a little bit for each user, in a different direction. So, at release time, all the wallpapers look the same, but over the course of a month or so they all end up being different. For each release, we’d vary the “elements” a little, i.e. the number and relative strength of lights / flares / blurs.

Otto from the Canonical design team explains the ‘generative wallpaper’ idea further on the Canonical Design blog.

Bane or Boon

Mark’s comments were made to a thread on the Ayatana mailing listr titled ‘OMG! Ubuntu! – Bane or boon?’. The thread was a result of our own readers reactions to the initial default wallpaper for 10.10.

Related posts:

  1. Ubuntu 10.10€²s new default wallpaper (for now at least)
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  • http://dieki.myopenid.com/ Dieki

    See? Canonical does listen to user feedback.

    • Anonymous

      This is an exception dude. They listen, but they don’t listen good enough.

  • Anonymous

    Is he talking about a dynamic wallpaper here? SVG? Glad they listened to our, errr, “feedback” (warpath).

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  • Anonymous

    The idea sounds amazing.

  • Anonymous

    OMG great!

  • http://twitter.com/Nickedynick Nick Stringer

    This seems like an incredible idea!

    I’m not sure how many regular users would notice, but it would be interesting to see included.

  • lunamystry

    WOW that sounds real cool.

  • Anonymous

    So effectively a moving wallpaper?

  • Will

    Evolution by genetic drift is fine, but I really want to see 10.10′s wallpapers generated by Darwinian natural selection.

  • Anonymous

    Now that Ubuntu is close to perfection, is the right time to address very subtle issues like this. Since every aspect of stability, usability and compatibility has been succesfully solved, the owner of the company developing this distro can finally spend some time in joyfully silly nuances like this.

    THIS is what will turn every eye in the computing universe on Ubuntu.

    (Jesus Christ…)

  • Vomit-Critique

    About the bane or boon thing.

    Doesn’t anyone else think that’s shocking?

    They were actually debating if OMGUbuntu’s users were proper enough users to matter!

    Calling the previous wallpaper ugly is considered to offensive and against the CoC and the OMGUbuntu users aren’t the real ubuntu community anways.

    Thank god Mark stepped in.

    Let’s hope they he had a strong talk with them, about how to properly interact with potentional customers and the large loyal fanbase.

    • Yi Sun-sin

      By “them”, you mean ”Vishnoo” ? Or what ? Why is there a plural ?

  • http://anxiousnut.wordprss.com Anxious Nut

    but sadly, most users change the default wallpaper!!

  • showing the figs

    Yeah, we obviously shouldn’t care about the little touches of awesome (such as this) unless we solve every single stability issue first.

    That’s sarcasm btw.

    • Anonymous

      How about meeting half way and stop this nonsense until at least 50% of the stability issues have been solved? How about forgetting about this teenagers’ stuff until Ubuntu becomes more solid each release instead of the current trend of breaking more things than they fix, system-wise, every six months?

      You definitely should care about “awesomeness” (real one, not this little silly touch) when you’re close to, let’s say, 80% of your deep issues solved. Doing so when you’re so far from it, is very ridiculous and casts a shadow of unprofessionality to the project.

  • http://www.expatsinksa.com/ Bilal Akhtar

    Though SABDFL sent a mail on that thread, he didn’t mention OMG!. pity…

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  • Existenceextincter

    I think its time for live wallpapers

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/YCSKYW5XAZBXWHZ2I5RPCNXYBU Isaac

    Yes that is the first thing that shocked me too! Their reaction to us “non-geeky end-users” was SO cold and rude! They couldn’t care LESS about us I guess…

    • Anonymous

      Maybe we should also grow a thick skin too?

      When we comment about them, they are supposed to take it .
      But we are not supposed to be questioned?!!?!!

    • Anonymous

      Maybe we should also grow a thick skin too?

      When we comment about them, they are supposed to take it .
      But we are not supposed to be questioned?!!?!!

  • http://openid-provider.appspot.com/mark_c@markecurtis.com Merk

    The original post was simply called “The new default wallpaper”. Then one of the readers, I suppose rather than taking the criticism, lashed out at the criticizers and changed the thread title to “OMG!Ubuntu a bane or a boon?”
    The conversation for the most part stayed on the subject of the wallpaper, but most people didn’t change the title back to “The new default wallpaper” when replying

  • Anonymous

    Mark congratulated us on the new site :)

  • http://twitter.com/Nickedynick Nick Stringer

    What happened to the plan to enable installation of Android apps?

    Because we’d probably already have live wallpapers if anything had come from that idea.

    • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

      One of the many ‘missing in action’ ideas… Facebrowser GDM anyone?

  • Anonymous

    I prefer Shasta selection, which is immediately changing the wallpaper after install. Some might even call it intelligent design, but that gives my decorative tastes far too much credit.

  • Lilly909090

    Sure! Moving wallpaper! That the most important thing to focus and to pay developer on.
    Little things like a audio framework that work, a decent video mounting program, the video chat support for msn or yahoo and all that things normal people need to really switch to linux are just minor issues X-D

  • http://nowhererabbit.blogspot.com/ Coniglio

    oh, ok, now it’s everything clear… you know… a wannabe-movement wallpaper.
    It’s ugly but, come on, it’s the best thing in which every user linux need to concentrate on! The light that enter throught the Canonical house, and focus on the unity of the the MOTUS! Ooooh my dear Shuttleworth lord! … -.-

    At less we have Debian prog that take care about the stability problems, right?

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  • Yi Sun-sin

    You are reading a blog about your favorite operating system, but you call yourself non-geeky ?
    That’s cute, but not very accurate.
    Face it, Vishnoo was only talking about some people from the OMG!Ubuntu! commenter, not about non-geeky users.
    And by posting this kind of comment, you are taking part of the process of building OMG!Ubuntu! commenters are very bad reputation.

  • Yi Sun-sin

    I just love your style !

  • Yi Sun-sin

    Well, try another distro. Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution around. You can try Linux Mint if you’re not found of geeky/tech stuff, or ArchLinux if you like to know how your OS works.

  • Anonymous

    They should have explained the wallpaper “rationale” before releasing it. Canonical should start communicating things before the community goes crazy criticizing them.

    I’m very upset on how things are going. The community (we’re Canonicals clients by the way) should be heard, always and they should give us what we want.

  • Anonymous

    OMG! Ubuntu! IS a BIG pice of the communtity and we’re very geeky indeed, at least most of us.

    HA! We’re so influential we made them reconsider their crap-ass wallpaper! The CoC is for Launchpad, we here at OMG! Have our own CoC, and it lets us criticize! ;) Like Benjamin said, “Just grow a thicker skin”.

    • Anonymous

      If this were true. Why werent the window buttons reverted? It caused a huge uproar than the wallpaper. an everyone hated it!
      Even design team said on their own blog that the shift was not their idea!

      Lets not fool ourself!
      Mark wouldnt have liked it either , hence he is getting it changed!

      Not for you or me!

    • Anonymous

      If this were true. Why werent the window buttons reverted? It caused a huge uproar than the wallpaper. an everyone hated it!
      Even design team said on their own blog that the shift was not their idea!

      Lets not fool ourself!
      Mark wouldnt have liked it either , hence he is getting it changed!

      Not for you or me!

  • Anonymous

    My style: greatly questionable.
    Your praise: greatly appreciated.

  • http://twitter.com/chuche17 Jesus Galvan

    There is the pulseaudio team for the audio framework and they don’t seem to take patches from Canonical or any other company/entity/person too seriously. Video mounting program? Empathy and their devs are responsible for the video chat support for MSN and Yahoo! or any other framework for that matter. Canonical can’t do everything so they focus on what is important to THEM.

  • Yi Sun-sin

    Well, the bad reputation is also due to a arrogance problem.
    If I could sell the vainglory of the prouder of themselves OMG! reader one cent the gallon, I guess I would be a billionaire !
    We all need a little humility.

  • http://omgubuntu.co.uk/ d0od

    There’s no arrogance on my part, what’s there to be arrogant about?!

  • Yi Sun-sin

    There is no arrogance on your part, and I never thought that there was. I wrote “the prouder of themselves OMG! *readers*”, not “the OMG! staff” ;⋅).

  • http://mirek2.mp/ Mirek2

    I like it that Canonical’s looking at changing the wallpaper, it just worries me that all they’ve talked about so far has been getting it to move (personally, I prefer a static photographic wallpaper).

  • Anonymous

    wow that would be great

  • Anonymous

    Doctormo has a prototype of this here http://doctormo.org/2010/09/03/random-genetic-wallpaper/

  • hansioux

    that’s so Vista….

  • Seth Kriticos

    For a moment I thought they wanted to use the default wallpaper to force users to interact with the wallpaper changing window. But as I see the default wallpaper ofter enough during installations, I’d like it to be something bearable. Great news.

  • Anonymous

    Dare I say… windicators?

  • Anonymous

    Yeah, that sounds pretty rockin’, actually. Maybe if they applied it as a general effect to apply to flatter wallpapers, it would catch on more. I’d like to see that.

  • Anonymous

    I was hoping someone just forgot about those…

  • Guest

    would be good if it could change any picture, slowly warping the family holiday snap in unimaginable horror.

    • Annonymoose ^^

      XD yeah.

    • Annonymoose ^^

      XD yeah.

  • http://twitter.com/tomdwright Tom Wright

    I have been looking into this and it turns out that gnome does already support this concept (it is how the cosmos wallpaper slideshow works). All it would take is several colourised or otherwise edited versions of the wallpaper and and xml file.

  • Anonymous

    Hopefully if you have a non-static but always changing default wallpaper many people will not change it… I will be one of those for example :D

  • hp-penguin

    Is OS’s wallpaper really so important thing to give so much energy on it?

    I personally look forward that Canonical should consentrate on more important things in Ubuntu.

    Most important thing should be more tested version before letting it out.

    And Canonical’s Ubuntu site should pay more attention, what Ubuntu-version it’s information is about? Hardware compatibility seems to vary after version to version, so just information on Ubuntu’s general compatibility gives very misleading information.

  • Marie

    Xubuntu has better wallpaper, look and feel.

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