I made a little joke — which some people didn’t find funny, alas — about the super bright, glaring white default wallpaper Ubuntu devs added to the Mantic Minotaur daily builds last week.

That joke is now even flatter as, following respectable™ consternation (i.e. a bug report) about the suitability of the background, Ubuntu developers issued an update to the image. That update dials the brightness down a notch or two (and eyes everywhere rejoice).

Those booting up Ubuntu 23.10 daily builds during the coming weeks won’t feel compelled to dive for their brightness keys as they’ll be greeted by the following (non-retina damaging) image:

Retina damage reduction

Much better.

If you saw my original post (or you used Ubuntu 23.10 during the past few days) you’ll also spot that the “23.10 Mantic Minotaur Development Preview” text has been shifted to the center — a much better placement.

The informative text was, in its original location, obscured by Ubuntu’s lone desktop icon (and, more amusingly, sat entirely off-screen for those on non-16:9 displays, defeating the point of it being there at all — which is to let people know they’re using a development image):

“Lets make a white wallpaper default”, said no-one, ever Ubuntu

This update is mildly amusing (to me) as the reaction to my original post from a few self-declared Ubuntu fans was along the lines of “omg is just looking to find fault”, etc.

And yet, Ubuntu devs changed the image.

Maybe my eyes were right all along 😎, yeah?