Today, the Xubuntu team are happy to announce the results of the 16.04 wallpaper competition in preparation for the 16.04 release only a few days from now!
Before we go into the results, we want to thank everyone who contributed to the competition! In total we had 92 submissions, which is over 10% more than for the 14.04 competition. Great work!
While we originally announced that we would be picking 6 winners, we eventually decided to pick a total of 10 winners. With many wallpapers tied on votes, we preferred to have more winners rather than trying to cut down the number to 6 exactly.
Without further ado, here’s the winners in alphabetical order:
Note that the images listed above are resized for the website. For the full size images, make sure you have the package xubuntu-community-wallpapers installed. The package is preinstalled in all new Xubuntu 16.04 installations.
In this series the Xubuntu team present some of the smaller details in Xubuntu to help you use your system more efficiently. Several of the features covered in this series are new for those who will be upgrading from 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS. We will also cover some features that have been in Xubuntu for longer, for those that are completely new to the operating system.
We have talked about customizing in this series before, but now we take a look at another aspect of it – wallpapers. Many people use personal ones, many just use whatever the default is. Some people don’t like them at all and change to solid or gradient colors. Let’s have a look at what you can do with them in Xubuntu.
If you’ve got the new 16.04 LTS release then you will have close to 20 wallpapers, including the new community wallpaper selection.
Applying different wallpapers per workspace
One of the easiest thing to accomplish is to have seperate wallpapers on your workspaces, so let’s assume for a moment that you have enabled more workspaces. Go to Settings Manager → Desktop and from the Background tab, disable Apply to all workspaces. After that you can set the wallpaper for each wallpaper by moving the dialog to each workspace and picking a wallpaper as you normally would.
Enabling automatically changing wallpapers
If you want, you can set the wallpaper to change automatically. To do this, enable Change the background in the dialog. After that you can tweak the settings: how often you want the change to happen, from somewhere in seconds … to daily. If you use the chronological option it will use all of the wallpapers you have in the selected folder split equally through the day. You can even set it to change at startup only. Finally, you can use the Random Order option to get it all mixed up!
Disabling wallpapers
If you want to use a single color on your desktop instead, set the Style to none. You’ll see the wallpapers become disabled. Now you can simply choose your Color and it will apply across the whole desktop. You can also use a horizontal or vertical gradient. Once you have enabled either of these options from the dropdown you will get to choose two colors.
Xubuntu 16.04 LTS will be the first Xubuntu release without a default media manager. To help those without a favorite one, we’ve put up this series where some of the Xubuntu team members talk about their favorite media managers. Later in the series we discuss some cloud services and other media manager options in the Ubuntu repositories. Enjoy!
In the concluding article of this series, we will go through alternative media managers and audio players found in the Ubuntu repositories along with some comments from their contributors and users. In the second part of the article, we briefly cover some less used alternatives as well as some other topics related to media.
Amarok
Amarok is a powerful media manager that integrates well with web services like Last.fm, Magnatune and more. Amarok comes with many features, like support for community-developed scripts, dynamic playlists, context views and more.
Amarok contributor: The people who love Amarok are those who want to dig more deeply into their music; they want to know about the artists, want to rate and tag their music, and have statistics about their listening habits. Amarok users want to be able to stream music as well as listen to their collection on disk.
Read more on the Amarok website.
Note: Amarok uses the Qt toolkit and will pull, relatively, many dependencies when installed on Xubuntu. Installing Amarok on a clean Xubuntu installation will use about 500Mb of additional disk space.
Audacious
Audacious is an audio player based on XMMS. Like its predecessor, it’s designed to be light but configurable and supports Winamp skins. It is extendable through plugins.
Read more on the Audacious website.
Banshee
Banshee is designed for the GNOME desktop it can, amongst other things, import and burn audio CD’s, synchronize music to and from media devices.
Read more on the Banshee website.
Exaile
Exaile is a music player with a simple interface and powerful music management capabilities. It is easily extensible via plugins and is distributed with over 50 plugins adding extensive functionality. Features include tabbed playlists, smart playlists, advanced tagging, album art and lyrics fetching, streaming internet radio, podcasts, ReplayGain, secondary device output support, and more.
Read more on the Exaile website.
Guayadeque
Guayadeque is a lightweight audio player that supports smart playlists and large music collections. Amongst other things, it features extensive labeling tools as well as a smart play mode that adds similar tracks to the queue.
Read more on the Guayadeque website.
Quod Libet
Quod Libet is especially popular with power users, with support for very large libraries, Replay Gain, regular expression & conditional logic searches, Unicode, command-line usage and advanced tag editing. It supports podcasts, internet radios and nearly all music formats and comes with over 80 plugins.
Read more on the Quod Libet website.
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is an audio player designed to be easy to use. Inspired by iTunes, it supports internet radios and podcasts, media device integration, music sharing and more.
Read more on the Rhythmbox website.
Tomahawk
Tomahawk is a music player that plays and manages not only your local collection, but also streams from SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, Google Play Music, Amazon Music, music lockers and many more. You can even connect Tomahawk with your friends via Jabber, Google Talk or Tomahawk’s new online community, Hatchet, to share your tastes, playlists and collection.
Tomahawk contributor: Tomahawk is basically a music metadata player. In short, given the name of a song and artist Tomahawk will find the right source based on the users available streaming music services and collections. This fundamentally different approach to music enables a range of new music consumption and sharing experiences previously not possible.
Read more on the Tomahawk website.
Note: Tomahawk uses the Qt toolkit and will pull, relatively, many dependencies when installed on Xubuntu. Installing Tomahawk on a clean Xubuntu installation will use about 260 Mb of additional disk space.
If you didn’t find your favorite player in the list above, don’t worry! In addition to the software mentioned above, there are many more media players and media related applications in the repositories.
If you want to play your media from the command line, try out cmus, moc, or mplayer. Alternatively you can set up MPD, the music player daemon, that allows you to connect several frontends to your music library, even from remote devices.
If you want to make your media available to other devices like your gaming console, you can use one of the UPnP servers available. These include Mediatomb, MiniDLNA and Rygel.
Finally, if you want to produce music on your computer, check out Ubuntu Studio, which is an Ubuntu flavor directed at artists of all kinds and largely based on Xubuntu.
In this series the Xubuntu team present some of the smaller details in Xubuntu to help you use your system more efficiently. Several of the features covered in this series are new for those who will be upgrading from 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS. We will also cover some features that have been in Xubuntu for longer, for those that are completely new to the operating system.
In 2015, the Xubuntu team created and introduced the Xfce4 Panel Switch, a tool that allows you to work efficiently with panel layouts. The tool allows you to either choose from presets available, and create and backup your own. Let’s have a look!
Switching panel layouts
Xfce4 Panel Switch is an intuitively simple tool to use. Simply select one of the presets and press Apply Configuration (first button from the left) to immediately start using the new layout. On the default installation, you can choose from Xubuntu Classic, Xubuntu Modern, Xfce 4.12, GNOME2 or Redmond.
Saving, exporting and importing
If you’re someone who prefers to create a completely customized layout, the tool has something for you as well. To put the tool to the test, why not create a new panel setup?
To edit panel preferences, go to Settings Manager → Panel and from the opening dialog, add and remove panels and change panel settings as you like. You can even change its orientation or even have it as a Deskbar so you can move it about the desktop.
When you are ready, go back to the panel switcher and press Save Configuration to save the setup. You can now switch between your newly created layout and the presets whenever you want.
Finally, you can use the Export and Import options to move your layouts to and use them on any machine with the tool installed.
Xubuntu 16.04 LTS will be the first Xubuntu release without a default media manager. To help those without a favorite one, we’ve put up this series where some of the Xubuntu team members talk about their favorite media managers. Later in the series we discuss some cloud services and other media manager options in the Ubuntu repositories. Enjoy!
In addition to the more traditional media managers which manage local collections, more and more people use cloud based streaming services. In this article, we talk about the cloud services and players used by the Xubuntu team.
Google Play Music
Google Play Music is available widely in the world, coverage areas including most of the Americas, Europe, Australia and more. You can use Google Play Music for free, but paid subscription options are available. Their song catalogue covers 35 million songs.
David: I mainly listen to music locally, CDs and vinyls. At work I usually use Google Play Music. Apart from their huge catalogue, there’s also the possibility of uploading up to 50000 songs, using the Google Play Music Manager API.
Elizabeth: I also listen to a lot of music locally, typically MP3s I’ve bought or created from CDs. However, I also have a monthly subscription to Google Play Music for the latest music I don’t feel compelled to buy directly. I’m using the web-based player in Google Chrome on Xubuntu, but it also seamlessly integrates with all my Android devices (including my watch!) via the Android apps.
Pandora
Pandora is available in Australia, New Zealand and the United States only. Their song catalogue is between one and two million songs.
The easiest way to use Pandora on Xubuntu is the web interface at pandora.com. For those seeking tighter or geekier (read: more fun) integration with the desktop, there are unofficial GTK+ and terminal clients available. The GTK+ client, Pithos, includes sound indicator and notification support. The terminal client, pianobar, allows station management and playback, as well as keybinding support. Both clients are available in the Ubuntu repositories.
Sean: I stream all of my music. I have a small music library from when I was younger, but became bored with my own lack of variety. While I occasionally use Spotify, I almost always stream Pandora, switching between the web interface, Android application, and the Pithos GTK+ client. If I’ve got music playing, it’s coming from one of my 50+ Pandora stations.
Spotify
Spotify is available widely in the world, coverage areas including most of the Americas, Europe and Australia. You can use Spotify for free, but paid subscription options are available. Their song catalogue covers about 30 million songs.
Currently, the easiest way to use Spotify on Xubuntu is the web interface at play.spotify.com. Playing and browsing works well with the web interface, but if you want desktop integration (sound indicator and notifications), you will have to install the desktop client. The desktop client isn’t available from the Ubuntu repositories directly, but Spotify offers their own repository and instructions on setting the desktop app up at the Spotify website. Please note: The desktop client is unsupported by Spotify. Since it’s closed source, it is also unsupported by the Xubuntu team. That said, our experience says it works well for most of the people and is totally worth trying if you want to use Spotify with desktop integration.
Pasi: While I mostly listen to music locally, I occasionally use Spotify to listen to new music that I want to try before I buy. For this purpose the web interface is more than good enough – the collection is also large enough to find most of the things I’m looking for.
