The official design and accompanying mascot for Ubuntu 24.10 ‘Oracular Oriole’ have been unveiled, featuring a unique celebration of the distro’s 20th anniversary.
No need for prophecy to foresee that the newly adopted mascot would be at the heart of Ubuntu 24.10’s default wallpaper. Since Ubuntu 17.10 ‘Artful Aardvark’, animal icons have consistently appeared in the standard backgrounds.
The wallpapers generally adopt a predictable pattern: a purple gradient, subtle embellishments along the borders, and a line-drawn depiction of the release’s featured animal at the center.
For ‘Oracular Oriole’, a geometrically styled oriole sits at the core, encircled by layers of concentric circles, with designs resembling moons and mystical symbols that mirror the ‘oracular’ element of the name.
If the decadent purple tones of the background aren’t to your tastes, Ubuntu once again ships with ‘light’ and ‘dimmed’ versions, with the latter being set when system dark mode is activated:
Now, I know it’ll sound twee and a tad pretentious, but I find the use of circles in the mascot artwork somewhat symbolic of Ubuntu and its community: the distro is very much the center point around which users, volunteers, developers, and enthusiasts coalesce and orbit.
Ubuntu 20th Anniversary Extras
Alongside the new default wallpaper are an updated set of backgrounds sourced from the community. Among them a fantastic modern remix of the original Ubuntu 4.10 ‘Warty Warthog’ wallpaper – not a 1:1 clone and, in my opinion, a better interpretation of it.
As Ubuntu 24.10 is Ubuntu’s 20th anniversary release (Ubuntu 4.10 debuted in October 2004) this ‘remaster’ drape will fit in very nicely with one of the celebratory easter eggs included in 24.10 (I won’t spoil which here, if you want to know, read that post).
Finally, in a further nod to its past, Ubuntu 24.10 has introduced a new LTS legacy wallpaper package for installation. This package contains high-resolution versions of the default Ubuntu wallpapers from 6.06 LTS up to 24.04 LTS, including the iconic 8.04 design.
If you are using the Ubuntu 24.10 daily builds, watch for the new wallpaper. It’s expected to be updated in the ubuntu-wallpapers package soon, or you can check Ubuntu’s release artwork assets folder to download them directly from any operating system.
Let me know your thoughts on this new wallpaper in the comments!
- Prior to this, only the Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 wallpapers included mascot animals.