Friday, September 25, 2009

Ubuntu Karmic Desktop

Yesterday was a big day for the Karmic desktop. Lots of pieces came together like switching icon themes, colour changes in the UI, a new dark theme for GDM, a new default background and, 19 photos chosen from the flickr group we started earlier this year.

The results of the flickr submissions is simply amazing. 639 members submitted 2001 photos. Selecting the images to include in Karmic was a big task, and if there were more free space on the disk, I would add more.

First, we chose a short-list. To do so, a group of Ubuntu artwork community members and Canonical employees collected their favourites and we invited the photographers to include their images in the short-list group. That same group then made a selection of 20-30 top photos and from that we have 19 stunning images for users to select from.

Anyone and everyone who took part in this deserves a big round of applause, and perhaps a beer from me :)

8 comments:

  1. Is there screenshots of new color/icon themes and GDM theme?

    I would not like to download image and start finding out how to see such. :)

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  2. The flickr group was a great idea. You guys really validated the "go to the artists, don't ask them to come to you" approach. You got more entries in the first few minutes of the contest than we ever have for the Free Culture Showcase.

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  3. Would it be possible to set up some kind of "Get Hot New Stuff" for the 2001 photos?

    Keep up the good work! Bye!

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  4. yeah cool!!! :D
    and compliments to all the participants! :)

    but why only 19?
    There were so many beautiful pictures :/

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  5. Rats! Upon you reminding me, I just realized one of my photos had a request to be added to the shortlist. Ah well, the ones that made it are pretty stunning :)

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  6. I'm pretty angry at myself because I only just noticed (after you reminded me here!) that one of my pictures got picked for the short-list. I never confirmed that, so it never got added. (Thanks for picking it, though! That makes me feel happy).

    The ones being shipped are all fantastic. Lots of interesting textures.
    They're more fantastic than mine, really, and I guess if my frog one got in that beautiful black and white one would have been considered kind of redundant... so I guess we all win in the end :P

    Beautiful work with the art. I'm excited to see a jump back to the chocolatey brown window borders. (And I, for one, appreciate not having the window icons for the menu button. That the window icon is also a menu has never been discoverable or logical).

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  7. Fantastic!

    Karmic is starting to look really nice. Will very likely be the best looking release so far.

    Are there some plans to provide an even broader selection with the wallpapers that didn't make it onto the CD as a separate package? I think the Linux desktop can't have enough nice looking wallpapers like these.

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  8. Which 19? I was select final on one image but can't find the link to final includes to Karmic release.

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