i count myself too young for that :P ------- but as some people like the idea and some people don't, at first i will just post some backgrounds, i will take a look at that pixmap gtk thingy and maybe submit some styles for it, it sounds interesting!
well, my first try for a decent background where me myself and i are not quite satisfied with: Click
It's 375.28 KB (384287 bytes). That's not "damn small" -- it's bigger than most of the backgrounds that came with Vista (which are mostly in in the 60-80k range at 1024x768 or 800x600, iirc)! Most of the backgrounds DSL has used, like the one you said is ugly, are less than 20kb. I've posted some that are less than 10kb on my blog. (Edit: And the classic backgrounds extension in MyDSL is 236K compressed, fwiw.)
This whole nitpicking about aesthetics is something that won't sit well with those of us who are anti-bloat because you're invariably arguing for style over substance. That's why it's best left to personal preference. Many people are using DSL because it has low resource requirements. A wallpaper that's a third of a MB (!!!) requires a lot more RAM than one that's only a few KB and reduces what the rest of the system can do. People need to keep this in mind when saying why DSL isn't as "flashy" as everything else.You can easily see how this affects performance particularly in those flashy systems that have everything from the default fat to (sometimes) minimalistic themes in a given desktop. I had Xfce running with Rox in a Vector desktop a little while ago, and wondering why the heck this supposedly light and fast desktop was so sluggish. After a quick change of the theme and desktop image, its performance shot up dramatically.
It makes me wonder sometimes about how much smaller and faster a *ubuntu or Windows or OSX system might be if all the developers of its parts were to simply replace all graphics with lighter and less flashy stuff....do nothing different but cutting back on the image load, and leave it up to the users to decide what visuals they wanted. I'm guessing it would save a lot of resources in a default install.Maybe some kind of 12 step program for computer paraphilias are in order. Perhaps the next step is some kind of fabric, producing tactile as well as visual stimuli, or hair like strands hovering around the monitor. I get excited just thinking of the possibilities for improvement.The program imagemagick works really good for reducing the size of an image without reducing the appearance. In fluxbox I have a style that chooses a random background image when it starts so I keep my images pretty small.Next Page...
original here.