It’s time to deck the digital halls: Christmas is just a few days away!
By now you’ll have put up your Xmas tree (which the cat’s since stripped), you’ll have wrapped the presents (impeccably well, I’m sure), and said HECK NO to the eggnog (wise, it is gross).
But did you leave your trusty Ubuntu desktop out of the festive festooning?
If so, consider me your seasonal saviour (just not that one). I’m here to help you sprinkle some Christmas cheer onto your screen. A simple tweaks are all it takes to make your desktop look as merry and bright as mine.
Linux Desktop, Christmas Style
1. Falling Snow
Snow is Christmas; you can’t have Christmas without snow. Well, unless you live in the southern hemisphere, I guess 😅.
Adding a falling snow effect extension/app is a quick and easy way to add instant Christmas vibes to your desktop. Folks have been doing it on macOS and Windows for decades. It serves no practical function, of course – but neither do most decorations you see during December🎅🏻 ho ho ho.
For Ubuntu I recommend you install the Snowy GNOME Shell extension by Artem Prokop.
This extension works on GNOME 40 and above (including GNOME 45 in Ubuntu 23.10) and is customisable, with options to control snow frequency, volume, rotation, etc. It also lets you edit the characters that rain down (unicode snowflakes by default, but any text or emoji works).
Looking for super-bling?
You’ll find a Santa’s sack of animated fluff in xSnow. It’s old app based on code from the early 2000s, and is designed for X11/Xorg. That said, it’s still included in the Ubuntu archives, and does work in Wayland via xWayland (unpredictably, in my experience – YMMV):
xSnow animates more than just snow, so if you want to see Santa’s sleigh pulled by reindeer riding high across your screen, this app gives you it! xSnow is CPU intensive and makes my highest-spec system melt faster than a snowman in the sun!
Install xSnow from the Ubuntu Software/App Center app, or run sudo apt install xsnow.
2. Linux Xmas Wallpapers
Now that the the snow is falling all (around us, children singing, all night long 🎵 — my favourite classic Christmas song that, fact fans) the next festive fix is to set a Linux-themed Xmas wallpaper as your desktop background.
For me, the Tux-themed Xmas wallpapers made by Mark Riedesel (aka Klowner) are much of a xmas tradition as stockings, Mariah Carey, and mince pies. They’re cute, Christmassy, and created using free, open-source design tools like Krita and Inkscape.
Mark’s been making these wallpapers almost every year, since 2004. As such, the 8 you see above are but a handful. You can view them all, and download them from his website. The images are mostly all 16:9, and available in PNG and SVG (the latter ideal for high-resolution displays).
3. Terminal Xmas Tree (Bonus)
In the various GIFs strewn about this post, you’ll have glimpsed an animated Xmas tree running in the terminal (BlackBox, for those curious). It’s the ChristBASHTree bash script and like all good baubles it’s there to look pretty, and nothing else.
Download the script from GitHub, then run at-will (you don’t need to add to it your profile and spend most of January trying to get rid of it). I edited the script, changing the blinking text to read “OMG!”. The version you download won’t say OMG!, but CODE.
Summary
Whether you celebrate Christmas, or merely put up with it, these two simple tips will give you a classy, Christmassy computing setup — and why not? We decorate our houses, our trees, and ourselves (ugly xmas sweaters ftw). No reason our desktops should be left out of the fun!