Desktop Background Packaging Guidelines
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.
Summary
Owner
- Name: Yaakov Selkowitz
- Email: yselkowi@redhat.com
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora Linux 44
- Last updated: 2025-11-18
- [<link to devel-announce post will be added by Wrangler> Announced]
- [<will be assigned by the Wrangler> Discussion thread]
- FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
- Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
- Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
Detailed Description
Fedora's packaging of the default desktop backgrounds, and the use thereof by desktops, makes it difficult for remixes and various Enterprise Linux distros (including ELN and CentOS Stream, as well as rebuilds of RHEL) to have their own backgrounds used by default. For example, KDE Plasma in EPEL ends up using the latest Fedora backgrounds out of the box rather than the EL's on which it is running.
The outcome of this Change will be twofold:
- Fedora desktop packages, as "consumers", should be changed as needed to follow these guidelines, so that the underlying distro's backgrounds are used by default.
- Fedora's own default backgrounds, as a "provider", should comply with these guidelines so that they do not conflict with the default backgrounds of other distros based thereon.
Feedback
Benefit to Fedora
Scope
- Proposal owners: Provide PRs for relevant packages.
- Other developers: Review and merge PRs, or implement the guidelines themselves in their affected packages.
- Release engineering: #Releng issue number
- Policies and guidelines: New Guidelines needed
- Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)
- Alignment with the Fedora Strategy:
Upgrade/compatibility impact
Necessary changes are mostly backwards compatible. Incompatible changes will be limited to F44+ and ELN.
Early Testing (Optional)
Proof of Concept builds are available in COPR:
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/yselkowitz/backgrounds-v2/ https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/yselkowitz/cosmic-epel/ https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/yselkowitz/lxqt-epel/
Do you require 'QA Blueprint' support? No
How To Test
User Experience
The minority of spins not currently using Fedora's backgrounds by default will start doing so. This will mostly be visible to EPEL users once the changes filter down to there.
Dependencies
None.
Contingency Plan
- Contingency mechanism: None. Incompatible changes will not be made until everything is in compliance.
- Contingency deadline: Final Freeze
- Blocks release? No
Documentation
https://github.com/fedora-eln/eln/issues/341
Release Notes
Desktop environments and choosers now conform to Desktop Background Packaging Guidelines, which allow derivative distributions to substitute their own default desktop backgrounds without needing to change other packages.
