New wallpaper time for September/October!

[NiHaiden]

Hello stargazers,

it’s this time of the year again. Summer is over and there’s no better way to begin fall season with some pumpkin spice and a wallpaper straight out of the oven from @Chandeleer the scope master himself.

Rolling out over the next weekend, you will find 2 new wallpapers, this one being the new default for the coming month:

It looks very nice.

If you want to have all characters from the Auroraverse on your wallpaper, you can also use the other new wallpaper to do just that!

Until next time!

Signing off

~ Niklas

[Schmuuu]

Compared to the early wallpapers (with the boy standing in front of his telescope) I don’t enjoy the direction the wallpaper development is taking

Could we go back a few steps and follow the older style more? It felt more serious and like something you could use on your work PC.

If steps back are not the desired direction, then maybe there is a different path we could take?

Looking at the last few Aurora wallpapers side by side to the older Aurora wallpapers or the Pop!OS wallpapers with their Cosmic desktop, it feels like Aurora doesn’t want to be taken seriously (or is only addressing young people or I don’t know). Maybe I just don’t understand which users are targeted. I’m definitely irritated.

Sure wallpapers can be changed easily and quickly, but after a fresh installation, the wallpaper is pretty mich the first thing users see.

I’m suggesting Aurora to a lot of people and challenge them to try it out (first time Linux actually) and the first response was always about the wallpaper (and with the next sentence if it can be changed and how).
I would like to have the wow factor back

[j0rge]

@Schmuuu

I’m definitely irritated.

Some of you deserve the Linux desktop.

[Chandeleer]

Hey Schmuuu,

I’m the new wallpaper artist of Aurora! For some clarification the first aurora wallpaper turned out to be AI, which is why I was reached out to by Niklas to make real ones.

Scope is going to be Aurora’s mascot like Konqi is KDE. So far most people in the community like the direction I am taking the wallpapers. It’s extremely unique compared to most desktops.

If you’d prefer wallpapers of a different style feel free to contribute your own art to the Aurora project. We’ll always welcome up and coming artists with open arms.

[NiHaiden]

Wallpapers are very much a very subjective thing. The first wallpaper was nice, but it was also AI generated and had no real artistic vision or identity. Chandeleer / Chandler has created a visual identity for Aurora with the wallpapers for Aurora and it’s purposefully not looking to be conforming or maybe “corporate”. I searched for a long time to make a nice artistic theme for Aurora and never found something I really liked until Chandeleer came along and created it. If you don’t like the wallpapers, this is totally fine and we are not trying to force them upon you. As the others have already said, 90 or 99% of the people love the wallpapers that were crafted.

If you some ideas or wallpaper visions you would like to see, you are always welcome to share them, but also be mindful we purposefully try to not be conformist and have some creative freedom with our wallpapers, it’s a volunteer-driven passion project after all.

Cheers ~ Niklas

[Schmuuu]

I already feared, that feedback will not be well received. That’s why I hesitated before already. It took me 1,5h to write the message, because I wanted to write feedback in a respectful and constructive way, but it looks like I failed, and I want to apologize to everybody whose feelings got hurt. It was not my intention.

@Chandeleer

Hey Schmuuu,

I’m the new wallpaper artist of Aurora!

I know, I’m following all the activities on Github and here in the forum and I liked your idea for a mascot and gave the news about the mascot a like when they were posted.

@Chandeleer

If you’d prefer wallpapers of a different style feel free to contribute your own art to the Aurora project. We’ll always welcome up and coming artists with open arms.

That’s a feedback I see a lot in the open source community and while it’s definitely a great thing, that everything is open and people could contribute, you probably know and understand, that still not everybody really can contribute in such a way. I enjoy art, think about art, go to exhibitions and understand how difficult and even time consuming it is especially regarding design or an (corporate) identity. But I also understand and know, that I’m not an artist (I’m just a consumer of art) and that I couldn’t provide anything which is even close as good as what you delivered.

However, I think it is not healthy for a community or for progress in the broader sense to wash away feedback with such statements.

It’s strange, sometimes there are questions for feedback and it’s said, that even providing feedback is some form of contribution, because it provides insights into the thoughts of users or the community and then sometimes there is the kind of reply saying, if you don’t like it, then make it better yourself.

For me this was an attempt to contribute at least feedback, because many users (especially the more non-technical ones, who use their computer only for browsing and mails) don’t join the forum and provide it themselves. And in this case I took a lot of time, to provide feedback from the users I talk to and as written above wouldn’t register to a forum (mostly because they don’t know how a forum works).

So why not take my post as it is: feedback from one user (with collected feedback from 7 others) and that’s added to the list of all the feedback so far. There are some (most?) positive and some (just a few or just this one) negative and so you get an overview. You can even ignore this feedback, this is totally fine. But ideally there is no push-back to people who care enough to provide feedback. If my post felt like a (personal) attack, you have every right to criticize me for this attack, not being constructive feedback of course.

I believe you all know how it is with feedback: in some case you get only the negative feedback, because the happy customers don’t take the time to write a positive reviews and sometimes it is the other way around. Both cases are bad.

@j0rge

Some of you deserve the Linux desktop.

Why?
Watching your videos were you showed Bluefin, we could all see your eyes glow, when you showed and praised the beautiful dinosaurs wallpapers. And I can totally relate, I love them, too. Can you blame me for wanting such responses for the Aurora desktop as well?

I don’t even understand what you want to tell me. Yes, the Linux desktop is not great, yet, but should everybody move over to MacOS or Windows (or rather stay there), just because there are some struggles - or in this case, just because opinions about art diverge? We are all here, because we prefer Linux and even accept there are obstacles. But it’s a different topic.

Personally, I want to bring as much people to the Linux Desktop as possible and I help out everybody - who I convinced to move to Linux - when they have questions or have issues. And this is currently the only way I can contribute as it already reduces my daily sleep to less than 6 hours (sometimes only 3h) per night for months already.

And the other way I try to contribute: I collected business computers, will install Aurora on them and then donate them to children, whose parents cannot afford a computer (which the children need for school). I like the idea that children get in touch with Linux first and not with Windows.

@NiHaiden

Wallpapers are very much a very subjective thing.

Absolutely true.

@NiHaiden

but also be mindful we purposefully try to not be conformist and have some creative freedom with our wallpapers

Nothing against creative freedom, totally fine with me.

@NiHaiden

it’s a volunteer-driven passion project after all.

(A general question not at all related to the wallpaper) But you do want to be a System (not to say distribution) for everybody, right? It’s a passion project, but still a long-term project to stay, right? I still remember the slogan on the Aurora website, that Aurora is a system “for your grandmother” (which is what hooked me).

Edit: corrected some typos.

[NiHaiden]

@Schmuuu

(A general question not at all related to the wallpaper) But you do want to be a System (not to say distribution) for everybody, right? It’s a passion project, but still a long-term project to stay, right? I still remember the slogan on the Aurora website, that Aurora is a system “for your grandmother” (which is what hooked me).

Aurora will not go away anytime soon, this is still a long-term project!

[Axcraig]

I love the wallpapers. Very unique and vibrant. I keep checking to see if new ones have been published yet. @Chandeleer thanks and keep up the great work.

[omnibli]

@Schmuuu, I think you did a fine job of stating your opinions without getting personal with your criticisms. I think there is a valid point to be made about the default wallpaper and what it says about the project.

To me, Bluefin’s dinosaur wallpapers strike a near-perfect balance between playful and mature; they have some whimsy, but they have muted and consistent color palettes that keep the art “quiet”. In my mind, that balance reflects the distribution’s ability to both be used for enjoyment and getting work done reliably without the OS getting in the way. I feel like Aurora’s original wallpapers were balanced in the same way, being both colorful but also subdued and calm. (That said, I had no idea about their AI origins, so I agree with them being removed from the project.)

I think that concept of “balance” is the main rub here for folks like myself and Schmuuu; the new direction taken has shifted that balance definitively towards the playful, cartoonish side of the spectrum - that’s not a bad thing, and I promise I am not condemning it. The shift just makes me worry that there will be a fair amount of people, both Linux newbies and power-users alike, that will see it and disregard Aurora as a toy, not something that is actually insanely reliable for getting projects done.

In the end, these changes aren’t going to affect me. I will still LOVE using Aurora/Bluefin on my desktop/laptop respectively to work and play. I will still evangelize UBlue distros to my friends and family because they won’t have to deal with “Linux things” - it all will Just Work, and it won’t break. The only negative from all of this for me, personally, is that I won’t be using Aurora’s built-in wallpapers unlike how I use Bluefin’s suite of dino wallpapers. That’s a minuscule downside, and it’s made even more minuscule by the fact that most distros, Aurora and Bluefin included, don’t even ship wallpapers in my monitor’s size (I have a Samsung G9, it’s a completely gratuitous 5120x1440 pixels).

I would love to put my money where my mouth is and contribute my own “balanced” wallpapers, but unfortunately making high-quality art is something that requires a lot of skill and technique that I don’t have. I think the only thing close to a “solution” to assuage the opinionated curmudgeons like myself would be to put out more deliberate notices to the community that you are accepting submissions for artwork and supplying them with style guides for the mascots akin to Konqi’s wiki page (and promotional material page). Perhaps you already are doing all of that, I will admit to not doing my homework on this point.

Apologies for the rant.

[Chandeleer]

Hey! Just wanted to clarify some of your concerns in your post

First off thank you for being respectable. What exactly would you have in mind for wallpapers. Do you just not prefer anything with a cartoon character or is my oil paint like coloring style not to your taste.

We can look into proper guidelines for the mascots for sure. But if the issue is the wallpapers being too “youthful” that really won’t solve the critiques. Also on the topic of the aspect ratio.

Unfortunately Its really hard to justify making wallpapers in ultrawide, given they will be a minority of users. It would also double or even triple the amount of work each wallpaper would take. Thus i’d need to charge about 2 or 3 times as much as I currently do to respect my time. I dont think anyone would be willing to pay $120+ per wallpaper.

[kolunmi]

We get you guys don’t like the wallpapers. @Chandeleer acknowledged your feelings on the matter. Why do you take offense at the suggestion that you should contribute something “better”? What more do you want? At this point, this thread seems to be belaboring the point for what was supposed to be a celebratory post. If I were Chandeleer, my feelings would undoubtedly be quite hurt to be reading these essays which basically boil down to “your art sucks” / ”do something different”. Also let’s be clear, that this is a free software project run by volunteers is a valid consideration when it comes to feedback of this sort. Waving that away and accusing him of “unhealthy” behavior doesn’t come off well.

[omnibli]

Easy one first - I was not complaining about the lack of ultrawide wallpapers. Ultrawide monitors are a completely ridiculous novelty, and I wholeheartedly agree that we shouldn’t be wasting effort in making wallpapers for them. The whole point of my bringing it up was just to illustrate that I am not personally invested in my position on this discussion - I did not come into this already thinking that I was right and you/Aurora were wrong. I’m aware that I’m probably of the minority opinion here, I just felt like adding my two cents because I felt Schmuuu’s feedback was mostly being brushed off and de-legitimized.

Just to state this explicitly, I do not hate your art. I think it’s cute and fun! I would have no issues including it in the bundled wallpapers if I were the one leading Aurora, I just don’t know that I’d choose this particular piece to be the default one for all users. My entire position in this discussion is simply that I don’t know if “cartoony” is the correct “vibe” for an operating system that wants to promote itself as a good fit for both personal and professional use.

(Later edit: I think a good analogue to my position here is Debian’s Space Fun theme. It’s so full of whimsy and I love it!! Debian shipped it as a bundled theme from Squeeze (6) through at least Stretch (9), but it was never the default theme for an operating system that prides itself as being universally usable)

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think the main feature that makes my brain categorize it as “not mature” is the thick black outlines to everything. It makes my brain associate it with cartoons, which again, is not necessarily a bad thing! If that’s the look and feel you are going for, then you did an amazing job.

Now for the hard one.

To answer your question about what I have in mind for wallpapers, I don’t really have any concrete ideas - like I said, I’m not really qualified to talk about art. When I think back on default wallpapers that stuck out to me as “iconic”, I think of XP’s “Bliss”, Ubuntu 8.04’s “Hardy Heron”, Vista’s “Aurora”, Debian Stretch’s “Soft Waves”, and Win10’s “Hero”. While I don’t think it’s considered “iconic,” I’ll also throw in the Fedora 16 wallpaper, which I can’t seem to find a name for other than “F16-Alpha,“ as it’s a bit more of a fair comparison as an explicit illustration and not just vector art.

Since I can’t talk in a technical sense about them, I’ll just speak to what I see as common threads between them. For starters, they’re all relatively simple with only one main focal point/subject. Their color palettes tend to be mostly shades and hues of 1 or 2 main colors with sparing accents otherwise. To my eye, they all portray a sense of motion with their use of lines, mostly smooth and fluid curves. Extremely subjectively since I can’t think of a more technical way to phrase this, they all feel “calm”.

None of the points above are meant to be taken as an example of something your art lacks.

I hope that this can serve as an answer to your question. I sincerely apologize if anything I said came off as rude or offensive, I promise it was never my intention to belittle the effort you’ve put in to your art and this project. Please keep making art!

[Danathar]

I like it, its playful and whimsical.

[tolga_erok]

Install variety and you’ll get varied random HD visually appealing wallpapers that will change automatically or pause on the current image along with random quotes to your preferences.

I too agree the current wallpapers (aurora/bluefin) do tend to take that professional feel away.

It was the 1st thing my gf made when she saw the dinosaurs and or the new aurora wallpapers and also wanted it changed in a very short period.

Each to heir own but I second the art is a little too youthful looking for a darn good professional distro (bluefin or aurora)

[NiHaiden]

Art is a very subjective due to its nature. You are always welcome to make suggestions on the art style or suggest/contribute new wallpapers you think we should include or just change the wallpaper to another one, like you do already.

It’s hard to come up with a unique art style that doesn’t look like something else and looks like a copy-cat, so we like to think that the art-style that Chandeleer has chosen reflects this uniqueness that Aurora is trying to create. It may not seem “professional” to some, but that’s a very subjective thing anyway. We as maintainers and contributors to Aurora like the wallpapers that Chandeleer has crafted. That’s all I have to say for this topic, imho.

[Sedovex]

I don’t like the the new wallpapers either. I understand they are handmade but they feel more AI-made than previous ones.

I never wanted to open a topic on this myself, but since it has already been stated I will gladly add my opinion here.

I think we have the right to be irritated by these wallpapers changes since they are automatically changed when an update is done.

Moreover, I was using the the last two wallpapers with the guys looking at the moon. I really liked the one with the single guy looking to the right, with many stars and that blueish/greenish color of the Universe - what was that from, Fedora 40? But now I cannot use this stock Aurora wallpaper because I cannot find it anymore in the wallpaper menu and neither can I find it in the specific usr folder.

In conclusion: the wallpaper that we have is forcefully being changed without our consent and secondly we cannot even use the previous work that was already done for the community.

[inffy]

Yep, the AI wallpaper was removed because people complained that we use AI art.

I am just going to close this thread now, your opinions have been registered but we currently have this art decided and as we are “an opionated image” there will be decisions made by the maintainers. And as previously said, if you/anyone wants to create wallpapers/art for Aurora, we are happy to accept PRs for them.

Atleast its just the wallpaper, you can easily change that.