Hello fellow nixers,
There are two types of background images popular in the Unix customization community, tiled wallpapers and blurred wallpapers.

We choose them because they are smooth and don't disrupt our focus from our workflow.

We already have a thread to share tiled walls and now here's the one where we share our scripts, images, and ideas, of blurry wallpapers.

Here are some utilities that can be used to blur an image:
Imagemagick
hsetroot which can set the wallpaper as blurred directly

http://alpha.wallhaven.cc/ is a great source of wallpapers.

A nice use of blurring is to use it when locking your desktop.
This blog post http://plankenau.com/blog/post-10/gaussianlock shows how to setup the desktop to blur once you lock it.

Share your experience with blurry images and wallpapers.

I don't like blurred wallpapers, instead I use a gradient to stop myself from being distracted.

Ah, I've had continually had trouble with compiling i3lock. Has anyone else got a decent lock program that enables setting a background image? I'm using slock at the moment.

I really like unsplash for background images. They're all high quality and not distracting. They also have an API that grabs a random image (of a certain size) and returns a URL to a valid image.

# i.e. calling this will give you a random image of size 1200x1080
curl https://source.unsplash.com/random/1200x1080 > img.jpg

More docs here: https://source.unsplash.com/

(07-12-2015, 09:49 PM)ninjacharlie Wrote: I really like unsplash for background images. They're all high quality and not distracting. They also have an API that grabs a random image (of a certain size) and returns a URL to a valid image.

# i.e. calling this will give you a random image of size 1200x1080
curl https://source.unsplash.com/random/1200x1080 > img.jpg

More docs here: https://source.unsplash.com/

That's neat! Thanks for the link.

I really like the bokeh style of blurred photography. (Ex: 1, 2, 3)

As for just running a Gaussian blur on your images, like with ImageMagick, I decided to start experimenting. The results are pretty good if you like the color palette of your image and want to minimize distraction, but the colors are about all that is preserved from the original image. You could blur it less so you still see the general shapes, but I found this to look pretty ugly, to be honest.

Here's an example of my before and after using 512x256 on ImageMagick's convert -blur command.



My impression is that this could have potential if you wrote a little script to switch between the blurred and original image whenever you want. So if you're just browsing online, you can use the original and enjoy your wallpaper's beauty, but switch it to a blurred version when you really want everything but your work to fade away.

(07-12-2015, 11:00 PM)cfoobaz Wrote: My impression is that this could have potential if you wrote a little script to switch between the blurred and original image whenever you want. So if you're just browsing online, you can use the original and enjoy your wallpaper's beauty, but switch it to a blurred version when you really want everything but your work to fade away.

Interesting manner to use blurring. So you would map a keybind to the command to swap between the wallpapers, is that right?

(08-12-2015, 02:29 AM)venam Wrote: So you would map a keybind to the command to swap between the wallpapers, is that right?

Yes. It's actually very similar to how the Android app Muzei works. The app sets a blurred version of a famous painting or artwork as your wallpaper, and you can access the original with a gesture of some sort (I don't remember exactly what). Something on the desktop, with the ability to use your own images, of course, would be fun and not difficult to make.

At some point I was using a blurred wall whenever there was a window on my screen, and the unblurred otherwise. This was fun, but this is really only for eye candyness :)
If I really want no distraction, I just set the background to full black.

Here is the thing in action: http://raw.z3bra.org/dev/random/autoblur.webm

(08-12-2015, 09:23 AM)z3bra Wrote: If I really want no distraction, I just set the background to full black.

But then all the smudges on my display show up!