The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: The best open source operating systems of 2025
News: Firefox adopts AI components, Asahi Linux works to improve the install experience, Mageia team plans for version 10
Questions and answers: Is software ever truly completed?
Released last week: Emmabuntus DE6-1.00, Kicksecure 18.0.8.7, MidnightBSD 4.0, Rhino....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Qubes project has a new stable release, Qubes OS 4.3.0, which updates the project's templates for Fedora, Debian and Whonix. The release announcement shares the key changes: "We're pleased to announce the stable release of Qubes OS 4.3.0. This minor release includes a host of new features,....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Barry Kauler has announced the release of EasyOS 7.1, an updated build of the project's experimental Linux distribution built from Devuan: "woofQ2-built EasyOS has version numbering starting from 7.0. It is built from Devuan 'Excalibur' (equivalent to Debian 'Trixie') binary packages, with major structural changes, including based on....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Synex distribution is based on Debian's "Stable" branch and offers a range of desktop variant along with a specialist server edition. Synex 13 "Server" offers predictable networking settings and a custom storage manager which simplifies LVM and encryption management. "ServerHub continues as the modular framework for enterprise....

Wallpaper Competition for Ubuntu 26.04, Resolute Raccoon, opened for submissions. 6 of them will be included in the disc images.

This is one of my top favorite community activities. I’m neither an expert artist nor a professional photographer, but I can get many cool images and vote my favorites to be optional wallpapers for all Ubuntu users.

Like the last competition, the submissions are grouped into 3 categories: Mascot Theme – artwork that features the mascot for raccoon, Digital / Abstract – artwork created by digital tools (e.g., Blender, GIMP etc), and Photography – high resolution image taken from a conventional or digital camera.

The top TWO voted images from each category will be included in Ubuntu 26.04 as optional wallpapers in the Appearance -> Background settings.

The rules for this competition include:

• Submitter must own the rights to the image.
• Full quality image must be 3840×2160 px. PNG and WebP recommended.
• No watermark, name or logo in image.
• image licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0 or CC BY 4.0

The AI generated artwork is NOT allowed! Because there are active legal debates on the ownership of AI generated artwork and whether it can be copyrighted or not. And, many popular AI generation tools use a license that does not align with those for the contest.

The wallpaper submission started a week ago on December 15th (UTC), few months earlier than the last 24.04 LTS. And, the submission window is open for few weeks longer than before, until January 28th. After the submission close date, all can vote until February 4th.

The entrance of Ubuntu 26.04 Wallpaper Competition:

 
 
Here are some of my favorite images from the submission page:

Images below are optimized for faster loading, please go to the link above for original files.

Add an animated Santa to Ubuntu with the Gnomelets GNOME extension. See Santa walk on app windows, jump and roam your desktop. Works with GNOME 45+.

You're reading Add a Pixel Santa to Your Ubuntu Desktop for Christmas, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

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