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Xubuntu Natty default wallpaper

The new Xubuntu Natty (11.04) default wallpaper has been chosen. Before further explanations, here is the new wallpaper (click for full size):


(CC-BY-SA 3.0 Pasi Lallinaho & Simon Steinbeiß.)

I agree, it’s pretty stunning!

Again, we’ve come a long way from the original mockups, and source photo files. Here are four of the mockups we did to achieve a mostly blue-toned, blurred wallpaper, but with some green hues to try to step out of the all-blue image of Xubuntu (and Shimmer Project):


My first draft, exceptionally produced in pixels, not vectors.


Simon’s (ochosi) very green & nature -emphasized version. Actually it’s just a blurred photo! Very nice whatsoever.


My second draft, which is very plasma-styled. Nice, but the color tones are a bit too gray.


The last draft, made completely on a Windows machine in 10 minutes! This actually worked out really really well. It’s used as is as the base for the final wallpaper.

What about the photo used then? Well. Even if the final style resembles me a bit of northern lights, the photo is actually not from a region with northern lights, as some of the most sharp-eyed people have already noted.

This shot is by Simon Steinbeiß and it’s from the Austrian Alps. (Click for full-size. CC-BY-SA 3.0 Simon Steinbeiß.)

As some of you who work with artwork already can already tell, the photo is not chosen for the looks of the original (even though I think the atmosphere is still pretty nice), but other attributes. Most importantly, it was pretty easy to trace to vector. Other attributes while selecting the source photo were that it had tree(s) in it and that the trees didn’t look dead, since Xubuntu should not look like dead!

That’s it for this cycle and wallpaper. Thanks for your time and all the feedback.

Internal competition and collaboration in Ubuntu

Mark Shuttleworth recently wrote about internal competition in Ubuntu in his blog. Mark says:

In Ubuntu, we have a lot of internal competition. Ubuntu and Kubuntu and Xubuntu and *buntu-at-large have to collaborate and also, to certain extent, compete. We handle that very well, I think, …

I don’t completely agree.

What’s wrong with the statement?

There is not much competition between the flavors. Different flavors have different target audiences*, and there is next to no overlap between the groups.

Sadly there also isn’t much collaboration between the flavors. We lack communication too often. As this many times mean unexpected work with broken features, it also heavily affects the Xubuntu development, since the Xubuntu team essentially only has one technical contributor.

* What’s the target audience for Xubuntu?

In the future, Xubuntu will have an even more clear target audience providing the only “conservative” desktop environment as Kubuntu has Plasma via KDE 4.x and Ubuntu will have the new GNOME Shell via GNOME 3.x.

I also would like to note that while Xubuntu has been said to be the lightweight alternative for older computers, it isn’t really how the Xubuntu community, or at least most of it, has been thinking about it. Many comparisons do already show that Xubuntu is coming nearer to Ubuntu in terms of memory usage, though these comparisons haven’t had much to do with real-life usage patterns and/or didn’t really test the base systems but a set of applications.

If you strive for the lightest of the Ubuntu systems, you should look into Lubuntu, which uses LXDE as its desktop environment.

This article is part of the article series .