It’s time to deck the digital halls: Christmas is just a few days away!
By now you’ll have put up your Xmas tree (which the cat’s since stripped), you’ll have wrapped the presents (impeccably well, I’m sure), and said HECK NO to the eggnog (wise, it is gross).
But did you leave your trusty Ubuntu desktop out of the festive festooning?
If so, consider me your seasonal saviour (just not that one). I’m here to help you sprinkle some Christmas cheer onto your screen. A simple tweaks are all it takes to make your desktop look as merry and bright as mine.
Linux Desktop, Christmas Style
1. Falling Snow
Snow is Christmas; you can’t have Christmas without snow. Well, unless you live in the southern hemisphere, I guess 😅.
Enhancing your desktop with a falling snow effect extension or app lends an immediate touch of Christmas. This tradition has been enjoyed on macOS and Windows for many years. Although it offers no tangible value, the same could be said for the majority of ornaments we place around our homes during the festive season 🎅🏻 ho ho ho.
For those using Ubuntu, I recommend downloading the Snowy GNOME Shell extension created by Artem Prokop.
This extension is compatible with GNOME 40 and higher, including GNOME 45 on Ubuntu 23.10. It is fully customizable, offering the ability to adjust the density, volume, and rotation of the snowflakes, amongst other features. You can also modify the characters that fall (by default, these are Unicode snowflakes, but any text or emoji will work).
In search of something with a little extra sparkle?
You’ll discover an array of animated content in xSnow. This old app, based on early 2000’s code, is designed for X11/Xorg. Despite its age, it’s included in the Ubuntu archives and functions in Wayland via xWayland (although this can be unpredictable):
xSnow promises more than just virtual snowfall, providing also the sight of Santa’s sleigh being pulled by reindeer across your screen. However, be warned that xSnow is CPU intensive, capable of making even high-powered systems struggle as if they were sunbathing snowmen!
You can install xSnow from the Ubuntu Software/App Center app, or execute the following command: sudo apt install xsnow.
xSnow is a Linux Christmas classic – and still going
2. Linux Xmas Wallpapers
Now that the the snow is falling all around us, children singing, all night long — my favourite classic Christmas song that, fact fans — the next festive fix is to set a Linux-themed Xmas wallpaper as your desktop background.
For me, the Tux-themed Xmas wallpapers made by Mark Riedesel (aka Klowner) are as much of a Xmas tradition as stockings, Mariah Carey, and mince pies. They’re cute, Christmassy, and created using free open-source, design tools like Krita and Inkscape.
Mark’s been making these wallpapers almost every year, since 2004. As such, the 8 you see above are but a handful. You can view them all, and download them from his website. The images are mostly all 16:9, and available in PNG and SVG (the latter ideal for high-resolution displays).
3. Terminal Xmas Tree (Bonus)
In the various GIFs strewn about this post, you’ll have glimpsed an animated Xmas tree running in the terminal (BlackBox, for those curious). It’s the ChristBASHTree bash script and like all good baubles it’s there to look pretty, and nothing else.
Download the script from GitHub, then run at-will (you don’t need to add to it your profile and spend most of January trying to get rid of it). I edited the script, changing the blinking text to read “OMG!”. The version you download won’t say OMG!, but CODE.
Summary
Whether you celebrate Christmas, or merely put up with it, these two simple tips will give you a classy, Christmassy computing setup — and why not? We decorate our houses, our trees, and ourselves (ugly xmas sweaters ftw). No reason our desktops should be left out of the fun!