just collected a cool bunch of jpgs of collapsed stars, cassini and hubble pics, venus and mercury poles, and other space backgrounds.
my normal MO: keep pics in a folder in /downloads, and manually add from there when displaying a new background.
I tried to move a bunch into where the budgie & gnome backgrounds are (user/share/backgrounds) and got a permission error.
So I think 'should I just shoehorn (sudo mv) this stuff into filesystem?
Gave me a permissions warning for a reason, right? What could happen? Linux doesn’t get the alternate data streams (ADS) crap that Windows has in pdfs and other files? is this simply a measure in case of jpg corruption?
or if you want to bypass all those questions then what is ‘best practices’ for non-system, outside background pictures?
The best practice is not to store user data in locations intended for system data.
That being said, you can move them there if you choose to.
The permissions error has nothing to do with the specific files in question. Almost all system locations are owned by root or some other system user and not writable by “other”
I wholeheartedly agree with this. At the same time, I must admit that in the past, I’ve both added and removed wallpapers from the /user/share directory.
However, best practice is to either use the GUI tool if you’re only adding a few. Otherwise, if you have a large number to add, they would go in ~/.locale/share/wallpapers (on Plasma and ~/.locale/share/backgrounds for gnome and xfce and I Believe other GTk DEs). If that directory doesn’t exist, you can create it with mkdir ~/.local/share/wallpapers (don’t use sudo for this because that directory needs to be owned by the user).
The only proverbial advantage to putting them in /usr is they would be available to other users.
Edit: Or mkdir ~/.local/share/backgrounds for GTK DEs.
I was wondering where all my endeavour backgrounds went. I downloaded a ton, set one, and never knew where to look again…
…in other words only the endeavour stuff is in .local. budgie/gnome, they are in /backgrounds.
this is what I’m talking about in post. Do I need three places to hunt for wallpapers? three that I know of…
so /.local does not require permissions? Its a sys folder. I really like to consolidate w/out violating best practices. lots of food for thought here, thank you
EDIT: I have to confess it’s pure laziness and less keystrokes/efficiency is the place I’m coming from. I last about a week with a good wallpaper…
Not to be pedantic, but ~/.local should always have the tilde (~) before it. Either that or /home/$USER/.local with $USER being replaced with your username.
Well if laziness is the reason why you want to save your wallpaper in the /user/share directory I would say that it’s actually a better idea to save it to your user home folder anyway because if you open your DEs file explorer you normally can’t even access any directories outside of your users home folder without opening it with elevated permissions (which in itself isn’t something you normally want to do). If you, let’s say, just save it in your ~/Pictures folder you can simply open your file explorer, click on the Pictures shortcut and set it as a wallpaper through the context menu when right clicking on the image file.
To add to this a normal unprivileged user account should only have access to /home/<username> and it’s subfolders. For everything else you should expect to need to use sudo or the root account.
thank you for this. I am going to abide by ‘best practices’ with ~/.local but your context menu stuff is interesting. thank you for your point of view, I really appreciate it. no sudo for me.
every single person here helped including those who advocated best practices, and I don’t have the admin power to give multiple best answers so I can’t, I’m sorry. Or would set all of you.
I can navigate to /downloads and select, then they are copied to ~/.local/path/etc, so this situation has improved: workaround w/no sudo and no usr/share.
It was worth it, I found some really cool stuff like the Venus south pole etc—space backgrounds and Endeavour were made for each other.
