You’ve decked the halls, put some lights up, and lobbed handfuls of garish, glass baubles at the nearest fir tree — next up: decorating your Ubuntu desktop!
There’s no reason why your desktop should escape the Xmas blitz — the rest of us can’t!
December is the most wonderful time of the year (or so we’re told), and there’s no reason why your Linux desktop shouldn’t be subjected the seasonal decorative blitz.
Superfluous eye-candy on your desktop is a sure-fire way to fuel the festive feels — though possibly not as much as watching Home Alone for the hundredth time might 😅!
Pick a Christmas wallpaper, open VLC to acknowledge its annual holiday easter-egg, hit play on a Xmas music playlist, then top things off by, er, adding falling snow on your desktop.
‘Let it Snow’ GNOME Extension
Falling snow desktop apps have been around for as long as desktops have. They’re just as popular with Windows and macOS users as Linux ones.
The easiest way to add falling snow to the Ubuntu desktop is to install the Let it Snow GNOME Shell extension. Once enabled, this makes a continuous flurry of snow emoji rain all your desktop.
Let it Snow is especially great as it works with multiple-monitor setups, ensuring no screen need miss out on the holly jolly-ness. A settings panel allows you to adjust how much of the white stuff drops, giving you the power to ensure a white Christmas.
Pair it with an evocative winter-y background for maximum effect.
Fun in the xSnow
Not using GNOME Shell? Or perhaps you do, but you don’t want to use an extension.
A great alternative to the Let it Snow GNOME Shell extension is xSnow, though as you’ll guess from the ‘x’ in the name, it’s designed for X11 — but don’t worry: it runs via XWayland on Wayland.
xSnow is a free, open source tool whose codebase has an impressive lineage, being based on a similar Linux tool made by developer Rick Jansen back in the early 2000s.
Unlike GNOME Shell snow extensions, xSnow doesn’t render a unicode snowflake emoji but a more feathery/indistinct snow shape (arguably more realistic). It’s also a lot more powerful; xSnow is an entire animation suite!
When xSnow is running snow falls down from the top of your screen. Snow can land on the tops of app windows (all windows in X11, or apps running in xWayland under Wayland). When you close an app window any snow on top of it falls to the bottom.
The longer you leave xSnow running the deeper the snow gets at the bottom of your display, where it settles and builds.
As mention, this is an animation suite. A variety of additional xmas-themed animations are available, and they can all be used on their own or together. You can see Santa’s sleigh pulled by reindeer across your desktop, display twinkling stars, flying birds, and more.
Sadly, xSnow is very CPU intensive. You get settings to control how intensive, but the more animated elements you put on screen, the greater the load is. On a desktop PC this may not be an issue, but on a portable device it will run your battery down.
Install xSnow in Ubuntu from the archives:
sudo apt install xsnow
Open the xSnow app to control what appears on screen, update frequency, colours, and so on.
You can download a .deb installer for xSnow from Sourceforge (warnings about random files apply), or build it from source). xShow will run on any Ubuntu-based Linux distro from 18.04 LTS and above. I’ve tested it on 22.04 LTS and 23.10 – it runs fine, aside from being CPU intensive.
Summary
Adding a falling snow effect to your Ubuntu desktop is easier than you’d expect. Whether you want a light dusting of white stuff, or a full-on snowstorm, you can quickly and easily enable a cool, animated, and superbly season effect with minimal effort.
Give it a go!