If any season can justify blingy excess, it’s Christmas (or as us Brits will involuntarily confirm after hearing a certain Slade song for the 47th time: “It’s Chriiiiiistmas!”).
In past years I’ve shown you various ways to give Ubuntu a Christmas makeover, like adding falling snow effect to the desktop, displaying a light-adorned Xmas tree in your terminal and plenty of wintery-wonderland wallpapers to choose from.
Well, how about a marauding troupe of pixel art Santa Clauses who rain, roam and leap about you Ubuntu desktop, like so (this is a video embed; hit play):
The developer of the Gnomelets GNOME Shell extension, clearly feeling festive, added a Santa Claus character in the latest update.
Gnomelet’s extension description says it brings “…small, animated 2D characters to life, letting them roam freely across your screen. They walk, jump, and even balance on top of your open windows.”
“Watch as they fall from the top of the screen, land on your active windows, and explore your desktop environment with charming pixel-art animations.”
Remember desktop pets? eSheep, Bonzi Buddy, and more adult-orientated alternatives? Those little animated characters wandered across your Windows 95/98/XP desktop (usually bearing a gift: virus, pop-ups or an unwanted browser toolbar).
Gnomelets brings some of that retro energy to GNOME Shell (sans the nasty bits). Small pixel-art characters roam your workspace, walk on window titlebars, leap up/down to other windows, and respond to physics (move a window away and they fall).
A small set of options are provided:
- Choose how many sprites appear
- Set sprite size
- Choose to appear in front or behind windows
- Respawn button
Cute, frivolous fun. Why not; ’tis the season and all that!
Keep in mind that when these charming/irritating little distractions are active they will use some system resources. If your computer is a bit of a turkey, keep that in mind.
They say “a pet isn’t for Christmas it’s for life” and so is Gnomelets: if you pop into the extension’s preferences you choose other cute pixel pet offerings, including a cat (ofc), puppy, squirrel, mouse — no raccoon yet though ;)
Get Gnomelets on GNOME Extensions (GNOME 45+)