On Wallpapers

TL;DR, I’ll be switching to releasing new wallpapers every second Plasma release, on even-numbered versions.

This is just a post to refer to for those who have asked me about Plasma 5.15 and a new wallpaper. Since I started working on Plasma 5 wallpapers, there has always been a number of factors determining how exactly I made them. After some agonising debate I’ve decided to slow the wallpaper release pace, because as time has gone on a number of things have changed since I started contributing them:

Bugs & Releases. One of the early goals for wallpapers was to have one for each release so developers could identify versions of Plasma in screenshots of bug reports. This has become far less important, as issues have gone from “the bug causing everyone’s machines to catch fire while eating kittens” to things like “maybe stealing your left sock from the dryer”. Back in the day most distros didn’t offer rolling release options, so users would be reporting the bugs and sharing screenshots of old buggy versions. That, too, has changed; not only are rolling release options more plentiful, but standard release distros are well passed the dark days of immature Plasma 5. All said and done, we just don’t need wallpapers for developers to identify problem releases anymore; the bugs are far less severe and people are more up-to-date.

LTS Plasma versions & quality. While it may seem irrelevant to wallpapers, LTS stands out to as the place where we really need to pour love and care into our designs. With each new wallpaper I’m pushing things a bit harder and a bit further which means taking more time to create them, and I’m realising that at the quality I want to drive out LTS wallpapers with, it might take 3 to 5 dedicated days to produce a final product. That’s not including post-reveal tweaks I do after receiving feedback, or the wallpapers I discard during the creation process (for each wallpaper released, it’s likely I got halfway through 2 other designs). In other words, it’s becoming less sustainable.

The wallpapers aren’t crap anymore. It’s no secret, my first wallpapers were rough. When a new wallpaper was finished there were real quality incentives for me to take the lessons learned and turn-around a better wallpaper. Nowadays though most new wallpapers are visually pleasing and people don’t mind if they stick around for a bit longer. I know a lot of people even go back to previous wallpapers. Adding to this, it’s gotten easy to get older wallpapers; OpenDesktop, GetHotNewStuff both serve as easy access, and we now have some of the most popular default wallpapers in the extended wallpapers package. While new wallpapers are always nice to have, it’s no longer bad to keep what we’ve got.

Between those big three points, it brings me to moving the wallpaper cycle to every second Plasma release. New wallpapers will fall on even-numbered Plasma releases, landing squarely on the LTS releases and a feature release directly between LTS’s. That being said I hope that future wallpapers will show quality reflecting what the additional time will afford me to do.