Wallpapers – you know I love ’em.
Ubuntu 23.04 comes with a small selection of (largely lobster themed) wallpapers out of the box. The choice is neither vast nor varied so you may find yourself looking for some additional ones to liven up your desktop.
Well, one fast and easy way to quickly add more high-quality wallpapers to Ubuntu is to install the gnome-backgrounds package. This is available in the Ubuntu repos, though you’ll need to install it using the command line as Ubuntu Software doesn’t show a result for it).
This package contains the “official” GNOME wallpaper which you’ll have seen in blog posts, videos, and screenshots recently. I absolutely love it. I think it is one of the best “default” wallpapers of any OS, Linux or otherwise. It’s neutral without being bland; and visually interesting without being distracting.
Plus, you also get a selection of other top-notch supplemental backgrounds to pick from.
Most of the GNOME backgrounds(when installed via the repo) come in light/dark pairs. This change based on your dark mode preference. If light mode is active you get the version shown on the left-side of the thumbnail preview, and when dark mode is active it changes to the right-side preview.
I find some of Ubuntu 23.04’s default wallpapers unintentionally blurry, a few display artefacts, and even the default background suffers from gradient banding in the upper left, which I can’t help but notice — thankfully there are no such problems with the GNOME backgrounds.
You get a nice variety of content types, from colourful gradients with waves and geometric overlays, to impressively detailed 3D illustrations (created in Blender, I believe). The “keyboard” one is too busy to be a background I’d use daily but viewed on my 2K display the clarity is pin sharp — impressive!
I appreciate not everyone is as keen on wallpapers as I (and I’m sure some of you will reiterate the reasons why in the comments 🤭) but this is my quick-tip to those wanting more wallpapers without the 45 minutes of aimless web browsing that often occurs!
For more details on these backgrounds, check out the GNOME Gitlab.
