A new Linux wallpaper app appeared on Flathub this week, and I figured I’d give it a spin — result: my desktop now looks gorgeous.
Fondo is a very simple app with a very simple premise: make it easy to search for, browse through and set images from the royalty free photography site Unsplash as a desktop wallpaper.
The Flathub store description for the app states thus: “Fondo allows you to see thousands of beautiful photographs from the most recent to the one you are to (sic) looking for. Give a simple click on a picture to set as wallpaper, wait until the download is complete and enjoy!”.
Fondo’s straightforward interface shouldn’t present a problem to most users, not even the most technologically challenged amoeba; the UI is very much ‘what you see is what you get’.
Like many modern GTK apps these days Fondo supports dark mode. Far from trivial, dark mode can make it easier to appreciate the colours and composition within an image (and is why many image editing apps use a ‘dark’ background by default).
Fondo features at a glance:
- Browse by search term or category
- Keep scrolling to load more images
- Click an image to set as desktop wallpaper
- Right click for additional wallpaper display options
- View images full-screen
- Links to share images on social media
For more details, or to file issues, head over to Fondo on Github:
Worth installing?
I won’t lie: browsing Unsplash in a regular web browser isn’t exactly a hassle, and neither is setting images you find online as desktop wallpaper (Firefox even has a right-click context option for this).
But siloing the experience into the confines of a desktop app does make the whole process feel more fluid, easier, and less intense. Fondo is free of competing tabs; using it, you end up focusing more on the task at hand (namely finding a nice wallpaper).
To try it out for yourself head over to Flathub:
Remember: Ubuntu doesn’t include Flatpak by default so, to install Fondo, you must first install Flatpak and set up the Flathub remote.
If you’re using Linux Mint 19 things are much easier as you can install Fondo from the ‘Flatpak’ section of the Mint Software Manager app.