Actually the wallpapers in 21.10 that are currently in dev branch too are very bored. There are only a few ones too. I’ll like to have in the final build a lot more of there to have something preinclude to select.
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I agree the 21.10 wallpapers ended up with a lack of colour variety. Also at least one of them has too much noise to have qualified IMHO. It wasn’t adequately quality controlled.
These are attributes that the Ubuntu Desktop team could enforce better while still making it an open competition. Although LTS releases may be different and just take a selection of images from the previous 3 (non-LTS) releases.
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Could we improve how the voting worked to have more variety among the winners (aka, only one finalist per artist?) Yes, we should do that. Stricter guidelines on using your own work, since we did have some images that weren’t original? Definitely. But these were a labor of love from the community, and I am very, very hesitant to put more obstacles in the way of contributing or to seem, in any way, that we’re looking down on their contributions.
Maybe there is an opportunity here for you, @vanvugt or @miguelreyes17 to reach out to artists to encourage them to participate in the next wallpaper competition - or for us to increase participation in the Wallpaper category here on Discourse.
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I’m not making fun of anything. They’re simply end up boring you because there is no variety and you end up getting tired of the two wallpapers of 21.10, as really, there are only two, discounting the official one.
I think that this would improve with a greater variety of styles so as not to get tired of them so easily, maybe with more winners the next time?
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Sure. I’ll make my best.
It seems, although I know isn’t true, that they did not put much effort into the art of the backgrounds in Impish Indri.
I have now Jammy Jellyfish Dev in my machine, so I’ll be attentive to the updates to see the new art for my distro
THIS - a big THIS. I’d like to keep it so that people are encouraged to contribute.
If we’re going to make a change, we could make it more clear how to contribute wallpapers to the project.
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In recent years I think LTS releases have skipped the competition and we use a bunch of winners from the previous 1.5 years instead.
Whether that was by circumstance or policy I suggest it should continue. Because it means all wallpapers are community favourites, but every 24 months Canonical management has the ability to curate (and quality control) the subset of those which go into LTS. And really it’s LTS that matters most.
So this problem could be solved by simply doing nothing. No competition for 22.04, but there would be for 22.10.
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The two issues could also be solved in future competitions:
Variety
Have different categories, so effectively separate sub-competitions. A category could be a subject matter like “plants”, “machinery”, “landscape”, “abstract art”, or it could be divided like “mostly pink images”, “mostly green images”, “mostly blue images”.
Noise and image quality
Have entrants submit full quality 4K images right from the beginning (may require using a different site from this one). That way we can identify and request corrections to any low quality images early.
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Wallpapers that are completely different from years before, everyone looks at each that is installed and
downloads their own and installs what they need and enjoy.
From many pictures randomly downloaded or saved pictures.
Configuring for preference.
Within the color scheme for Ubuntu. Preference for Jammy 22.04 https://design.ubuntu.com/brand/colour-palette/
Hopefully Ubuntu Orange 100% #E95420 and background:
100% Canonical Aubergine #772953 Easy to see and mostly
different.
I don’t think there’s any preference for competition wallpapers to follow the Ubuntu palette. In fact having too many entrants follow the Ubuntu palette is part of the issue here. The Canonical Design team already provide default wallpapers that do follow the Ubuntu palette.
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The best we can do is encourage participation (submission and voting). This is a community competition, not something we should provide editorial control. We’ll need to ensure entries selected are distributable and appropriate, beyond that we are just facilitators.
As always, I’m really excited to see all the amazing submissions.
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The problem, in my opinion, is not necessarily the submissions - in the last competition we saw a huge number of participants with excellent images - but what ends up being selected. Why were only two images kept (of which one of questionable quality)?
I’m also wondering why the white/grey variation of the official mascot wallpaper is still being included. The idea dates back to the Unity 8 period but looks no longer useful to me.
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I looked for information on the Ubuntu 22.04 wallpaper contest but couldn’t find anything.
Searching this discourse didn’t yield anything but this thread.
I did a Google search but came up with nothing useful. The top hit was a negative Reddit post about Ubuntu 22.04 wallpapers and in the others I found only the Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 wallpaper contest.
So I suggest we start by making the information discoverable.
In the meantime, if someone can tell me here how to go about submitting an image (what got me searching to begin with) I would be eternally grateful.
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I’m hoping 22.04 uses a selection of past competition winners, and the next competition is not until 22.10. That would allow us to avoid the issues raised here, at least for the LTS.
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Hello Peter! I’m so glad you’ll be submitting an image for the competition! We have a ‘save the date’ post right now, and the official post for submitting entries to will be up on Friday in time for the Indaba.
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While we are having the 22.04 competition, you’ve given us some very good things to consider for reiterating requirements for images and looking at different voting methods to promote more variety among the winners, and I just want to say I’m very thankful for the concerns you raised, even if we will be moving forward with the competition.
And while this would be a longer discussion and a new topic, would you be interested in chatting about reinvigorating community contributions to desktop wallpapers - using those guidelines you suggested as a starting point for building a team of community photographers and artists who could create wallpapers for each release? I think it’s a really interesting possibility!
Can we not have the mascot? I like the default wallpapers but I think having no mascot would look better.
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Sorry for the delay, it was a national holiday here… Yes I am keen on discussing this topic in future. But primarily I wanted to show support for the idea of constructive criticism. It’s necessary to make Ubuntu better which is something we all want. It’s also something we experience daily as open source developers – being told our code needs changing.
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And thereby freezing out contributions from anyone else? Not criticizing, just shining a light on the other side of the coin.
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