How to Set a Wallpaper on Linux (GNOME and KDE Plasma)

Before you start

Save the original file somewhere permanent, such as a Wallpapers folder inside Pictures. Desktop environments refer to the file by its path, so if you leave it in Downloads and later clean that folder, the wallpaper disappears. To check your screen's resolution, open the display settings or run xrandr on an X11 session; on Wayland the display settings are the reliable place to look.

GNOME (Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation and others)

1. Right-click the desktop and choose Change Background, or open Settings → Appearance. On older GNOME releases the page is called Background.
2. Click Add Picture and select your file.
3. Click the new thumbnail to apply it.

GNOME keeps separate wallpapers for the light and dark styles. From a terminal you can set both, and choose how the image fits:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri 'file:///home/you/Pictures/Wallpapers/aurora.jpg'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri-dark 'file:///home/you/Pictures/Wallpapers/aurora.jpg'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-options 'zoom'

zoom fills the screen and crops the overflow, scaled shows the whole image with bars if the shapes differ, and spanned stretches one image across all monitors. Replace the path with your own.

KDE Plasma (Kubuntu, KDE neon, Fedora KDE and others)

1. Right-click the desktop and choose Desktop and Wallpaper (on Plasma 5: Configure Desktop and Wallpaper).
2. Make sure the wallpaper type is Image, click Add Image and pick your file.
3. Under Positioning, choose Scaled and Cropped to fill the screen, or Scaled, Keep Proportions to show the whole picture, then click Apply.

From a terminal, plasma-apply-wallpaperimage ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/aurora.jpg applies an image in one step.

Several monitors

KDE Plasma treats each monitor's desktop separately: right-click on each screen and set its own wallpaper there. GNOME uses one image for all screens; with zoom each monitor shows a cropped copy, and with spanned the picture stretches across the whole combined desktop. For a spanned wallpaper the right image size is the total desktop size, for example 5120 × 1440 for two 2560 × 1440 monitors side by side; the super ultrawide category is a good place to look.

Fractional scaling and sharpness

Display scaling enlarges text and controls, not the number of physical pixels. A 4K monitor at 150% scaling still draws the wallpaper on all 3840 × 2160 pixels, so a 4K image stays sharp. If a wallpaper looks soft, check the original's dimensions on its wallpaper page; an image smaller than the screen has to be enlarged. The aspect ratio guide explains what gets cropped when the shapes differ, and the Linux category collects wallpapers made for Linux desktops.