First of all: I’m sorry for how much it took to select the winner! Of course, having holidays during the discussion process caused some delays. The fact that all finalists were extremely high-quality works didn’t help either.
With that out of the way, I’m happy to announce the winner of this competition is “Sun/Comet”! We are in touch with the artist to set up shipping of the prize, and it will also have a new name to refer to both the light (previously Sun) and dark (previously Comet) variants.
I’d like to thank all the artists behind the other finalist wallpapers as well; you will also get some KDE goodies as a prize - which means I’ll now get in touch with all of you to set that up - and we absolutely want to include many of them out of the box in a Plasma 6 version, even if not as the default wallpaper.
I’d also like to thank everyone who submitted an entry. It really shows that our community cares for KDE as a project and is ready to contribute to it. I had never seen so much activity in a KDE contest!
And of course, a big thanks to Framework; it’s great to see support for KDE even in hardware companies, and this competition couldn’t have been organized without a prize: a Framework Laptop 13 DIY Edition (13th Gen Intel® Core™) - i5-1340P! The company has been actively in touch with KDE and we were very excited to collaborate with them.
As a reminder for everyone, Plasma 6 will be released - featuring this wallpaper! - in roughly 45 days. You can help us out by becoming a supporting member here.
There were so many wonderful wallpapers. It is hard to pick one for myself. Therefore, my plan is to start with this winning wallpaper when Plasma 6 is released, and then slowly move through the other wallpapers. I don’t usually change wallpapers and often stick to a single wallpaper for many years, but I always make an exception for KDE wallpapers to try them for a while before returning to my default wallpaper again. It might take me a while with this release, though. Well done, everyone. I wish you all the best
Congrats! It has a great vibe, even though I probably won’t be keeping it as the default.
And it definitely sets us apart from bigtechOS™️ -s and makes Plasma more distinguishable.
We got so many great designs this time!
Congrats to the winner, this is a beautiful wallpaper indeed, my fav out of the selection and I look forward to using it, especially with the day / time change.
One thing I would say though is that the style is very rounded and hand drawn, which, while beautiful, really gives a GNOME vibes for a default KDE Plasma wallpaper IMHO. In comparison, Safe Landing which was also in a drawing style had much more straight lines which didn’t give such a Gnome vibe to me.
So for me, the same one but with sharper / straighter lines and edges would have been a really cool Plasma version (and this one could be the Gnome version).
It’s a nice drawing, but as far as the color palette goes I completely disagree with this choice. It looks like it would be entered in an Ubuntu wallpaper contest, not a KDE one. Orange and Purple are literally Ubuntu’s color palette. It completely does NOT match the default Breeze color scheme (Is accent color from wallpaper on by default in Plasma 6? If it’s not that’s a major concern). The style is nice, I could see myself using it as a non-default wallpaper, but at the end of the day it just doesn’t give me KDE-vibes. Plasma isn’t that rounded, and the accent color in literally everything KDE-related is a light blue. If it was a blue sky with green leaves it would fit. If it had ANY cool colors it would fit. Also, this completely ignores the past geometric style, and it will heavily contrast with the current Breeze color scheme. If we want to break norms, because this wallpaper will probably inspire others in the next competition, then it should at least hue to the more established color scheme.
Although i agree that - while being a well made and beautiful wallpaper in itself - it doesn’t really seem to be a good fit for plasma and has more of a gnome/ubuntu feel. I was a big fan of all the more abstract and geometric wallpapers of the plasma 5 series…hopefully, for the next releases we can go back to that
