Comments on: Ubuntu 10.10 default wallpaper is here!

By: greg

greg — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 04:50:55 +0000

Yes, the wallpaper is replaceable, but it still stands as a symptom of what’s wrong with Ubuntu/Canonical: all this energy wasted on cosmetic changes, rather than fixing the many bugs of Gnome. Every six months, there’s a new theme and a new wallpaper, while every new release breaks some things that were working
properly.

Remember how they recently just decided to put window buttons on the left? The buttons were put on the left even if you had your own custom theme… You had to figure out how to change Metacity back to previous defaults in gconf…

What about, say, writing documentation for gconf instead of wasting time on wallpapers that look like an example from Lesson 2 of a Gimp tutorial?

I’m saying this as an Ubuntu fan.

By: LeoSolaris

LeoSolaris — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:49:37 +0000

Well, the easy way would be to set up a small script that plays aplay in the background at random intervals with a short CC licensed squeak sound effect.

If you’re not sure how to write the script, go find the squeak sound effect you like and I am sure that someone can take care of it for you if I am not around.

By: technologyunit

technologyunit — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 22:05:11 +0000

I am going to argue with the your opinion that people are going to change there wallpaper. My father uses windows and the wallpaper that was set as default is still the wallpaper today. Now you might say that older persons my not know how, but He is an IT professional. His reasoning is that you just don’t need to mess with it.Now am I wrong to think that perhaps others will have similar feelings? So the wallpaper should at least be respectable, and I guess it is, but not the quality we have come to expect.

By: totalizator

totalizator — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:55:12 +0000

The default desktop doesn’t matter but it does the trick. However, the upcoming one does not. Shame.

By: diego

diego — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 20:29:14 +0000

No wallpaper
xsetroot -solid ‘#152233′ in .xinitrc

By: Benj1

Benj1 — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:51:37 +0000

My girlfriend always keeps the default ubuntu setup, even after I spend time downloading ‘nice’ looking themes, but then again she doesn’t complain about the defaults either.

The kind of people that are bothered by a wallpaper enough to write a post about it are probably bothered enough to change said wallpaper anyway, so the problem is academic.

By: ymra

ymra — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:49:49 +0000

If only the boot and shut down screens were as easy to change as the wall paper.

By: Conkeh

Conkeh — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:28:37 +0000

It would be irrelevant if only Ubuntu, i.e., Canonical, didn’t insist on the look and feel, and if they did not imply that “design” was their chief if not only contribution back to Linux.

Who draws these wallpapers anyway? Are these lively works of art signed, or anonymous?

By: road

road — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:38:45 +0000

Maybe you don’t want too many people on “the team” but I’d argue that these days, all major operating system are capable of 90% of the same things. That being the case, “look and feel” is an important component of an OS. The wallpaper itself might not be too important, but wallpaper plus theme plus fonts etc etc combine to make a powerful impression on the user. And, I thought the whole point of Ubuntu was to gain widespread adoption for desktop Linux (i.e. attract the sort of users that might not immediately customize their OS).

By: Aberinkulas

Aberinkulas — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 03:44:51 +0000

I think the main issue is the symbolic nature of the thing, in that it looks like Mac OSX with pimples. Kind of something Ubuntu doesn’t really want to have.