Linux Mint Forums

Just came accross this while reading Distrowatch: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/ubun ... paper.html

I didn't see one positive comment, but makes for hilarious reading.

When I first saw the title of this thread, my first impulse was to get ready to prepare a scolding rant, "If you use Linux Mint, you are using Ubuntu like it or not, and you oughtta be grateful for Ubuntu, blah blah blah..."

Then I saw the link. Oh. My. Gosh.

The last time I saw a specimen like that, they had to shoot the poor critter. It looks like who did it and ran. That's gotta be a joke! It's gotta be!

-R

that looks awefull

I hated the Lucid background, but this looks like something I would be able to make. That's not a good thing.

Apparently Mark Shuttleworth made a post somewhere that they are or are thinking of changing it as the default wallpaper. So it may not be the default wallpaper.
Its really ugly imo

But there are lots of beautiful wallpaper in Maverick. The default is indeed ugly...

Apparently Mr. S. doesn't like criticism because all those comments were removed. I checked the release page and that is indeed the wallpaper they show.

Ugly, but who keeps the default wallpaper? It's always one of the first things I change in any distro.

MALsPa wrote:Ugly, but who keeps the default wallpaper? It's always one of the first things I change in any distro.

Me too, even with Mint. But you know newbies...They look at the release announcements of various distros, and many times go by first impression because they think it looks cool.

tdockery97 wrote:But you know newbies...They look at the release announcements of various distros, and many times go by first impression because they think it looks cool.

I wonder how many newbies do that. I never did. I don't remember keeping the default wallpaper when I was a Windows user, either.

MALsPa wrote:Ugly, but who keeps the default wallpaper? It's always one of the first things I change in any distro.

But why does it need to be ugly just because people change it? Why not make a nice one that people can change? They forever talk about making everything look "polished" and "professional" yet the first thing a new users sees is some purple gradient with orange blotches on it. All this effort has gone into "fixing" Ubiquity to make it seem polished (and seemingly more complex and confusing for Maverick), including the slideshow giving an overview of the system, and yet something as simple as a background gets made with 30 seconds of using random tools in GIMP.

Well, somebody thought it looked good! LOL! Anyway, from what I've heard, it might not end up being the default wallpaper.

Sometimes I think Ubuntu does things like this to stir up more publicity. Sure gets people talking!

It cracks me up how people get so worked up about a default wallpaper, though.

I don't know, I just can't see how disliking a distro's default wallpaper is enough to keep a person from using that distro, But I was taught to never judge a book by its cover!

I agree that it isn't a big issue. But I do think that if polish is what they are after then they shouldn't put all this work into redesigning Ubiquity and USC and leave out something as simple as the desktop background. Heck they could just pick one of the photos they ship along with it instead and it would look much better. Moreover, there's little to differentiate this background from Lucid's except the completely out-of-place orange blotches.

I know it's easy to overlook the wallpaper as just wallpaper, but it is very important. People, like noobs and current windows/mac users, add this into the mix of their first impressions. And although it's not likely to cause a make or break type type situation, it certainly adds to the overall feel of the OS.

A system so advanced, flexible and powerful as Ubuntu needs a wallpaper worthy, which would be a very tough find, considering it's such a great system. I think that a little translucent addition to the menu and some animation would help to spice things up. It's 2010 and it's becoming the standard.

I agree, the default setup is ugly. But I also hate the name. It sounds so crude.

The thing about ugly wall paper is that lots and lots of people will never change it.

I remember visiting offices at the university I'm delighted to be retired from (faculty and staff, users probably more computer-literate than at the average warehousing business) and noticing that the vast majority were using the default XP hop-field-in-Oregon thing. It can't be that they all just loved that wall paper or were fanatical Henry's drinkers....

A tiny minority had pictures of their cats or kids or of somewhere they had been on vacation as wall paper. The techies tended to have something interesting, some of it not pleasing to bluenoses.

I'm running the Maverick beta right now with the ugly default just because I'm interested to see if updates will change it. It all works pretty well for me. I find Mint to be more to my taste though; less fooling around to make it work the way I like. I installed the Debian edition on another disk, and it seems good too, but I don't have anything against Ubuntu and think I'll stick with normal Mint and use all my 8 GB of memory.