 People often ask me how can they make their computer desktop look better, right? Because they see all these beautiful screenshots that people are posting on various subreddits like r slash Unix porn, for example. And these people are sharing these just gorgeous screenshots of their desktop. And I sometimes get people asking me, hey, how can I make my desktop look like that? Well, there's a lot that goes into creating a real piece of artwork as far as a computer desktop. But I think by far the most important thing many people don't focus enough on is the wallpaper because the wallpaper really is the key to making a beautiful desktop. Think about it. What is actually taking up most of your screen real estate? Right now, I don't have any programs open on my computer screen. What are we actually looking at? Well, 99% of the screen is taken up by the wallpaper. The only thing that's not the wallpaper is, in my case, I've got a panel at the top of my screen. If I didn't have a panel on the desktop, then really all you would see 100% of the screen would be taken up by the wallpaper. So the wallpaper is by far the number one thing when it comes to making a beautiful desktop. And I think that's one of the reasons why when I do my first impression looks at various Linux releases, you know, in those videos, I always take a look at the wallpaper pack that ships with those Linux distributions. And I know some people laugh at that. I was like, why does he care about the wallpapers that ship with these Linux distros? Well, I care because I think it's one of the fundamental pieces to creating a beautiful desktop. So where can you get some beautiful wallpapers? Well, for starters, what I suggest doing is open a terminal. So I run an arch based Linux distribution. Of course, I am on Arco Linux. And in Arch, the great thing about Arch is there are a ton of great wallpaper packs available in the standard repository. So in Arch, I could do a sudo pacman dash capital S. That's how you install software sudo pacman dash capital S in the name of package. And this package here should be available in every Linux distributions repositories. It may vary as far as the name, but it's typically called GNOME backgrounds. So install GNOME backgrounds, mate dash backgrounds is another one that is available in pretty much everybody's repositories. Now here's one that's not available in every Linux distribution, but it is available on Arch Linux deep in dash wallpapers. Another one that's available in Arch, but may not be available in every Linux distribution is elementary dash wallpapers, if I can spell it correctly. Another one that is actually in most Linux distributions repositories is the plasma wallpaper packets called plasma dash workspace dash wallpapers. And for those of you that are on Arch and want some Arch Linux type wallpapers, there's actually a Arch Linux dash wallpaper pack. So I would install all of those packages there. And for me, I've already got, I think most or maybe all of them installed before it looks like, I'll just quickly reinstall them. They're very small packages. Now that we have those wallpapers actually installed, where did it place those on the file system? Well, on most Linux distributions, it places wallpapers in slash usr slash share slash background. So I'm going to CD into slash usr slash share slash backgrounds. And if I run a LS in that directory, you can see I have Arch Linux, which is the Arch Linux wallpaper pack that I installed, Arch Linux, which was just the standard Arch Linux wallpapers that shipped with Arch Linux, which is the distribution I'm running at the moment. Then is the deep and wallpaper pack we installed. GNOME is the GNOME backgrounds package we installed and Monte is the Monte backgrounds package that we installed. Now what about the other wallpaper packs we installed? We installed elementary dash wallpapers, plasma workspace dash wallpapers. Well there's actually a second directory on the system that sometimes distributions place wallpaper packs other than slash usr slash share slash backgrounds. There's actually a slash user slash share slash wallpapers directory as well. So if I CD into slash user slash share slash wallpapers and do an LS in this directory, you will see the elementary dash wallpaper pack that we installed deep in is also here because technically the deep in wallpaper pack was deep in dash wallpapers, although it looked like it placed it in both user share backgrounds and user share wallpapers. So I guess it put it in two different places. And then the rest of this looks like the plasma wallpapers because I know the last default plasma wallpaper was called shill and there is shill right there. So it looks like that's where the rest of our wallpaper packs that we installed were placed. And now that we know the two different directories to find the wallpaper packs, then all we need to do is go in those directories and set one of those images to be a wallpaper. Now on my system, there's a program I use called nitrogen that I use to set my wallpaper. It's a nice little graphical application where you give it a directories and then it displays all the wallpapers in that directory. And then you click on one and then you can set it to automatic scaling a scaled centered tile zoomed. You can set it full screen. So if you're on a multi monitor system, it's going to stretch it across all the screens. I have three monitors, for example. If I set one of these to be full screen, it's not going to look very good. It's just going to stretch it really wide across all three of my monitors. So I can go in here though and set it to screen one screen two or screen three, which is really nice because I can actually have three different wallpapers on each of my three monitors. So that's a really nice touch. I've actually done a video about nitrogen in the in the past. So I won't talk too much about how nitrogen works, but all you really need to do is go into preferences and then give it a directory to search for wallpapers. So I'm going to delete the directory. It's currently viewing and I'm going to add a new directory and the directory I'm going to add is we're going to go into user share backgrounds. So I'm going to go into the root file system here and then I'm going to go into USR share and scroll down here and we'll do backgrounds first and I could go and choose the Arch Linux wallpaper pack, the Arco, Deepin, GNOME or Mate backgrounds packages. But if I just do this directory all by itself, what it'll do is it will recursively search this directory and we'll get all five of these wallpaper packs displayed here in nitrogen. So let me do that and it's going to repopulate the nitrogen window and of course a lot of these are the Arch Linux wallpaper packs. That's really nice. It looks like that's all it displayed though. That's because I'd actually clicked on the Arch Linux wallpaper pack. Let me go back in here and select user share background and just user share backgrounds. I'm not going to do any of the subdirectories. And now let's repopulate this list. And now we get the Arch Linux wallpaper pack, the Arco wallpaper pack, GNOME, Mate and Deepin. All their wallpapers should be displayed here for us. And these are some really nice wallpapers actually. I really like this one right here. Let me go ahead and set that. Right now I'm recording monitor two on my system. So I'm going to apply that to monitor two. And there you go. Very quickly we installed a wallpaper pack and set one of these new wallpapers. And I've got several to choose from. And that was just from user share backgrounds. Of course in user share wallpaper I also had more Deepin wallpapers, elementary wallpapers and of course the plasma wallpapers to choose from. And those were just wallpaper packs that I found in the standard Arch Linux repository. If I got into the AUR I could probably find dozens more wallpaper packs because anybody can contribute anything in the Arch user repository. It's a community repository. Just very briefly, I did a search, a quick search for wallpaper, the key word wallpaper in the AUR packages. And I got five pages worth of stuff. It looks like 197 packages. Now not all of these are wallpaper packs. Some of them are programs related to wallpapers. But a lot of them are actual wallpaper packs. I mean there's an Adwaita background package. There's an Adapta KDE package. There is AnterGhost wallpapers. So that was the wallpaper pack for the old AnterGhost Linux distribution that is no longer with us. It's a dead project now. But a lot of Arch based distributions have their own AUR packages. That's how they get a lot of their artwork, AnterGhost being one. So they just created their own wallpaper pack and threw it in the AUR. Just looking through this list, there are Fedora wallpaper packs in the Arch user repository. Very cool. There's a beefy miracle background package, just some really cool stuff. So there's a lot to play around with in the AUR if you want to explore that. Now let me get back into my desktop and I'm going to launch Nitrogen again. And I will show you the wallpaper pack that I use. So I'm going to delete user share backgrounds from this list here. Let me add my wallpaper pack, which is in my home directory at wallpapers. I'm going to select that, click OK, and this is DT's wallpaper pack. And I actually have my wallpapers available for you guys to check out if you want it. All you need to do is go to my GitLab. So if you go to gitlab.com slash dwt1, that's my GitLab. And I have a GitLab repository called wallpapers. And in that repository you will find about 300 or so wallpapers in my wallpapers repository. You really don't have to go to GitLab. If you already have Git on your system, all you need to do is let me open up a terminal and zoom in. You need to run this one command here, git clone. And then https colon slash slash gitlab.com slash dwt1 slash wallpapers.git. Run that and it will clone my wallpapers repository onto your system. And then all you need to do is open your wallpaper program, Nitrogen for example, and search through that directory and select your favorite wallpaper out of my pack. Another interesting thing you can do is there is a program that is available on most Linux systems called Variety. You have to install it, but it will be in your repository. On Arch you would sudo pacman dash capital S Variety. It's a wallpaper changer, but it does have the ability to download wallpapers for you. I actually already have Variety installed on my system. I never use it because I don't like my wallpapers changing randomly. Which is what it does. You see I launched it. What it does is I had it set to search my wallpaper pack and just randomly go through my wallpapers at a specific interval like every 5 minutes, every 10 minutes it will change to the next wallpaper in my wallpaper pack. It's a really neat tool, Variety. It does have the ability I believe to actually grab images from the internet and download them. I go into preferences here. I see manual downloading. You can fetch wallpapers from various wallpapers sites like Imager and Flickr and DeviantArt and things like that. I typically don't use that feature with Variety if I was going to use Variety. I'd probably just use my own wallpaper pack, but that's nice that it can download random images from the internet and also put that on your desktop. For those of you that like randomly changing wallpaper, it's a pretty neat program actually. One last thing I will mention if you're looking for places on the internet to go and grab wallpapers from, there are various subreddits out there where people share their own photographs and artwork and some of it is really high quality stuff that can be used as wallpapers. Also, those of you that don't mind checking out 4chan, there is a 4chan called WG for wallpaper general, so the address is whatever the 4chan address is 4chanboards.org or whatever the heck it is, slash WG for wallpaper general. Now, be warned though, if you've never been to 4chan, some of the wallpapers there are going to be not safe for work. You're going to have some that are adult oriented, so be careful there, but you can find some really nice wallpapers. As a matter of fact, a lot of the wallpapers in my wallpaper repository were from WG. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this show, Abseed, Alice, Gabe, Lou, Mitchell, Alan, Akami, Arch5530, Chuck, David, the other David, Dylan, Gregory, Louis, Paul, Scott, Wes, and Willie, they are the producers of this show. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode about how to make your desktop look beautiful with the right wallpaper. This episode wouldn't have been possible without each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. The show is also brought to you by all of these fine folks as well, this ever-growing list of names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because the DistroTube channel, I don't have any corporate sponsors, I'm just sponsored by you guys, the community. And if you'd like to support my work, I'd appreciate your help. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace. I wonder if there are any anime wallpaper packs.