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Documentation › The desktop

Appearance and backgrounds

Light and dark, accent colors, backgrounds, picture of the day, icons, fonts and Night Light

Settings → Appearance.

Background

On top, a preview of your desktop. Personalize your background chooses what fills it:

Dynamic (follows the sun)
The Aurora landscape changes through the day (dawn, day, dusk, night) with the sun where you are, and crossfades between them. Series picks which of the three included sets of pictures it uses: Starfall (the default, with the Milky Way at night), Veil (misty valleys) or Horizon (calm, simple ridges). Each of the twelve pictures can also be chosen on its own as a Picture, or shown in a slideshow.
Picture
Recent images shows the pictures used lately; Browse Photos… picks any image (a copy goes to ~/.local/share/backgrounds); All Wallpapers… opens a searchable gallery of every wallpaper, which only draws the thumbnails in view, so it stays quick with thousands of pictures.
Picture of the day
A new background every day from Bing, NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day or Wikimedia Commons' Picture of the Day, with its title and credit under the preview. Aurora asks the service for today's picture once a day and keeps the last week in ~/.local/share/aurora/daily; nothing else is sent.
Slideshow
Pictures from a folder of your choice (its subfolders too), or the included ones, changing every 15 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours or 24 hours, in order or shuffled.
Solid color
One of twelve colors, or any color with the color button.

Wallpapers are looked for in /usr/share/backgrounds, ~/.local/share/backgrounds and ~/Pictures/Wallpapers. The lock screen shows the picture on screen, unless you choose otherwise in Lock Screen, under Background: Same as the desktop, The desktop's, blurred (a soft, darker copy, made once per picture) or A picture of its own; and Show my name and picture, which can be turned off so the lock screen shows only the time, the date and the password field. The login screen, which comes before any account's settings, shows the Starfall series at the time of day.

Style

  • Color scheme: Light, Dark or Auto (dark from sunset to sunrise where you are).
  • Accent color: nine colors, used by buttons, selections, switches, widgets and the Control Center.
  • Icons: Aurora (light and dark variants), Papirus, or any installed icon theme.
  • Pointer and its size.
  • Animations (all interface animations) and Window animations (opening, closing, minimizing windows; files floating in when a folder opens).

libadwaita, GTK 3, GTK 4 and Qt apps all follow the style and accent color.

Fonts

Interface, document and monospace fonts and sizes, scaling, anti-aliasing and hinting. Aurora uses Inter for the interface, JetBrains Mono for code, and Noto for every script.

Night Light

Warmer colors in the evening: from sunset to sunrise, on your own schedule, or all the time; choose the warmth. It changes the screen's color tables, which the graphics driver has to allow: virtual machines and a few drivers don't. Then Aurora says so with a notification and on the Night Light settings, instead of silently doing nothing; on a computer, installing the graphics driver (Settings → Updates → Additional Drivers) usually fixes it.