Jazz up your Desktop with Picture of the Day

Picture of the Day is another such app, this one built in Rust with a GTK4/libadwaita GUI.

Its role is simple: let you preview the latest ‘picture of the day’ images from four well-known online sources, as well learn more about what the image shows. Then, if you like what you see, set it as your desktop wallpaper.

Alternatively, you can tell the app to automatically download a new image of the day and set it as your desktop background.

There are plenty of great wallpaper changer tools for Linux desktops. Many of those also come equipped to preview, download and automatically set art from a myriad of online art sources, stores and silos, as well as a stash of local image files.

But with more sources, more previews, and more choice comes decision paralysis (or worse: doomscrolling to appease dopamine – what if there’s an even nicer wallpaper next?).

Worse, you may end up enabling a backend where the content veers more to the wild side — you’ve less chance of seeing scantily-clad models draped over your desktop using this app!

More features are planned, including more image sources and making it easy for users to save an image they like so they can (manually) set it as a wallpaper again at a later date (copyright and licensing may mean you can’t edit or distribute it, etc).

In all, an interesting app for customisation fans.

Those who enjoy having a pretty desktop Picture of the Day should appeal – a true “set and forget and enjoy what you get” type tool, you don’t need go off and find new wallpapers yourself since you’ll get a fresh one each and every day.

Install Picture of the Day on Ubuntu

Interested in checking it out?

You can install it from Flathub—it uses the GNOME 48 runtime so if that isn’t already installed it will have to be downloaded first, but the runtime is shared by all apps which use it—or you can fetch the source code on GitHub to compile it by hand.