[solved] Do you think plasma-workspace-wallpapers should be slimmed

zse · 2026-08-25 12:24:24

The plasma-workspace-wallpapers package is the 7th largest package on my system, taking 255MiB and only beaten by libreoffice, cjk fonts, thunderbird and browser engines.

Personally I would like it if that package would be trimmed down significantly, as it is updated quite often, slowing down system updates pretty regularly, and I do not think it providing much value, given that the KDE background chooser has an "Get more" button, making it very easy to fetch more on-demand should the preinstalled ones not suffice.

Additionally, I assume the different wallpaper resolution versions come from a single high-res image, and then cropped and down-sized, so I think another way of reducing the package size is to just ship the high-res original with the metadata necessary to properly adjust that version to the local resolution dynamically.

I'm asking for your opinion here to see whether sufficiently many are inconvenienced by this as well, as I don't want to bother the package maintainer with some minor gripe only I have.

Last edited by zse (2026-08-25 13:51:56)

arojas · 2026-08-25 12:59:31

zse wrote:

I do not think it providing much value, given that the KDE background chooser has an "Get more" button, making it very easy to fetch more on-demand should the preinstalled ones not suffice.

Why do you have it installed then?

I don't want to bother the package maintainer with some minor gripe only I have.

There is nothing for the PM to do here, the package is provided as delivered by upstream.

V1del · 2026-08-25 13:06:48

This is as provided by upstream and I like having the historically shipped wallpapers.

Luckily for you, pacman does have mechanisms to help you with minor gripes you have about packaging decisions: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman … _to_system -- while this will still download the full package the effective install size will go down depending on what you want to pick to not extract

Last edited by V1del (2026-08-25 13:07:11)

zse · 2026-08-25 13:10:42

arojas wrote:

zse wrote:
I do not think it providing much value, given that the KDE background chooser has an "Get more" button, making it very easy to fetch more on-demand should the preinstalled ones not suffice.
Why do you have it installed then?

Well having some default backgrounds makes sense, and it is also installed by plasma-meta, which I'd like to keep using instead of micro-managing all the individual plasma packages to have a sane desktop.

arojas wrote:

I don't want to bother the package maintainer with some minor gripe only I have.
There is nothing for the PM to do here, the package is provided as delivered by upstream.

Ok, then instead of the PM I could bring it up upstream, but same thing, I only want to bother them when there are more people behind this.

zse · 2026-08-25 13:13:46

V1del wrote:

This is as provided by upstream and I like having the historically shipped wallpapers.
Luckily for you, pacman does have mechanisms to help you with minor gripes you have about packaging decisions: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman … _to_system -- while this will still download the full package the effective install size will go down depending on what you want to pick to not extract

Uh, well the download is the most annoying part for me.. but still good to know, thanks for the tip.

seth · 2026-08-25 13:29:49

pacman -Rs plasma-workspace-wallpapers

# Maintainer: Me <me at here>

pkgname=plasma-workspace-wallpapers-dummy
pkgver=1
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="doesn't ship porn anyway"
arch=('any')
license=('GPL')
depends=()
provides=(plasma-workspace-wallpapers)

pacman -U --asdeps plasma-workspace-wallpapers-dummy*

Then fetch some from https://boards.4chan.org/wg/ (NSFW and lately ridden by AI slop, but hey)
Alternatively (to 4chan) steal from microsoft:

#!/bin/bash

erexit() {
    echo "$*"
    exit
}

[[ " $@ " =~ " force " ]] && rm /tmp/.bingwp.*

offset=0
[[ "$1" =~ [1-9][0-9]*$ ]] && offset=$1
market=${LANG:-en-US}
market=${market%.*}
market=${market/_/-}
read data < <(curl -s "https://www.bing.com/HPImageArchive.aspx?idx=${offset}&n=1&mkt=${market}")

# extract image url
image=${data#*\<url\>}
image=${image%\</url\>*}
# smaller versions
# 1920x1080, 1366x768, 1280x768, 1280x720, 1024x768, 800x600, 640x480

# do we need to update?
read md5 dash < <(md5sum <<< "$image")

set_wallpaper() {
    feh --no-fehbg --bg-fill "/tmp/.bingwp.$md5" || erexit "/tmp/.bingwp.$md5 is not an image"
    if type notify-send > /dev/null 2>&1; then
        info=${data#*\<copyright\>}
        info=${info%\</copyright\>*}
        notify-send -u low -t 8000 "New Bing Wallpaper" "$info"
    fi
}

if [ -e "/tmp/.bingwp.$md5" ]; then
    [[ " $@ " =~ "update" ]] && set_wallpaper
    exit
fi

# clean-up
rm /tmp/.bingwp.*

# get & set wallpaper
curl -s "https://www.bing.com/$image" > /tmp/.bingwp.$md5
[ -e "/tmp/.bingwp.$md5" ] || erexit "Failed to obtain https://www.bing.com/$image"
set_wallpaper

You'll have to adjust the set_wallpaper function but idk. to set a plasma wallpaper (probably the shell has some dbus interface)

arojas · 2026-08-25 13:44:54

zse wrote:

Well having some default backgrounds makes sense,

The default background is in the breeze package.

and it is also installed by plasma-meta

That's no longer true

zse · 2026-08-25 13:50:53

Oh you are right, I just noticed it is indeed optional now. Cool, I can simply remove it. Never mind me then, and thanks for whoever made it optional.

genericity · Today 04:22:12

You can ask KDE developers to convert them to JPEG-XL when making the distribution tarball. Plasma already supports the format. A 10x compression almost for free.

zse · Today 12:31:08

genericity wrote:

You can ask KDE developers to convert them to JPEG-XL when making the distribution tarball. Plasma already supports the format. A 10x compression almost for free.

I am happy enough just not installing that package at all, which is now easily possible with the package no longer being a required dependency of plasma-meta.

If someone else cares about making the package smaller, I suppose they'll have to ask upstream themself. Although anyone can also simply download the package, extract the wallpapers they want, convert them to JPEG-XL or do whatever. Personally I don't really see the point in having them as a package anyway, but as long as it is easy to avoid having it installed I'm not complaining.

Arch Linux

#1 2026-08-25 12:24:24

[solved] Do you think plasma-workspace-wallpapers should be slimmed

#2 2026-08-25 12:59:31

Re: [solved] Do you think plasma-workspace-wallpapers should be slimmed

#3 2026-08-25 13:06:48

Re: [solved] Do you think plasma-workspace-wallpapers should be slimmed

#4 2026-08-25 13:10:42

Re: [solved] Do you think plasma-workspace-wallpapers should be slimmed

#5 2026-08-25 13:13:46

Re: [solved] Do you think plasma-workspace-wallpapers should be slimmed

#6 2026-08-25 13:29:49

Re: [solved] Do you think plasma-workspace-wallpapers should be slimmed

#7 2026-08-25 13:44:54

Re: [solved] Do you think plasma-workspace-wallpapers should be slimmed

#8 2026-08-25 13:50:53

Re: [solved] Do you think plasma-workspace-wallpapers should be slimmed

#9 Today 04:22:12

Re: [solved] Do you think plasma-workspace-wallpapers should be slimmed

#10 Today 12:31:08

Re: [solved] Do you think plasma-workspace-wallpapers should be slimmed

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