Here it is! 😯
Yeah, you probably figured that one out really quick. That’s not the default wallpaper for Ubuntu 10.10. I lied.
I lied because for weeks now people have been wringing their hands over a particularly awful image that was supposedly on deck as the default. Cue the sad cowboy music.
I’m going to say it again, because no matter how many times I repeat myself, there’s this pitiful whining revolt that takes place, like clockwork, every six months:
The default desktop doesn’t matter. You’re going to change it only minutes after you install it. Get past it.
Don’t try to tell me that Linux newcomers will be put off by crappy wallpaper. If someone is considering using Linux but can’t be bothered to look past the wallpaper, then they don’t deserve to use Linux. We don’t want them on our team.
And the fact remains: No matter what you pick as “the most beautiful desktop in the world,” there is somebody else on the planet who hates it, viscerally, with every part of their soul, as if they were staring into the Abyss itself. …
So here’s my advice: Download Ubuntu, then install it, then change the squeaking wallpaper. And move on to something more important in your life. 👿
Motho ke motho ka botho 
My wallpaper doesn’t squeek, is it supposed to? How do I fix that?
😛
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.
😀
While I agree that all this worrying over the default wallpaper is really stupid, the default wallpaper is an important part of someone’s first impression of a distribution, and you’d be surprised at how many people don’t bother changing it. Sane defaults are everyone’s friend.
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.
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).
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?
If only the boot and shut down screens were as easy to change as the wall paper.
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.
No wallpaper
xsetroot -solid ‘#152233’ in .xinitrc
The default desktop doesn’t matter but it does the trick. However, the upcoming one does not. Shame.
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.
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.