Changing background to an arbitrary colour

[Ryan Lerch]

This popped up in the Fedora google+ community, and just wondering if 
there is a way to be able to set an arbitrary colour as the background. 
(other than making a bitmap of the colour, and setting the image as the 
background)

https://plus.google.com/109533309209161533982/posts/Ws5CUnPeRrD

It is possible to change it manually in the dconf settings 
(org.gnome.desktop.background.primary-color & 
org.gnome.desktop.background.secondary-color), but this seems like it 
might be something that at least a few of our users might want to do in 
the control-center rather than having to hack at settings.

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2014-11-04 at 10:56 -0500, Ryan Lerch wrote:
> This popped up in the Fedora google+ community, and just wondering if 
> there is a way to be able to set an arbitrary colour as the background. 
> (other than making a bitmap of the colour, and setting the image as the 
> background)
>
> https://plus.google.com/109533309209161533982/posts/Ws5CUnPeRrD
>
> It is possible to change it manually in the dconf settings 
> (org.gnome.desktop.background.primary-color & 
> org.gnome.desktop.background.secondary-color), but this seems like it 
> might be something that at least a few of our users might want to do in 
> the control-center rather than having to hack at settings.

Its not very discoverable, but you can drag colors from e.g. the gimp
color chooser, and drop them on the control-center background chooser.

[Richard Turner]

On 4 November 2014 16:24, Matthias Clasen  wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-11-04 at 10:56 -0500, Ryan Lerch wrote:
> > This popped up in the Fedora google+ community, and just wondering if
> > there is a way to be able to set an arbitrary colour as the background.
> > (other than making a bitmap of the colour, and setting the image as the
> > background)
> >
> > https://plus.google.com/109533309209161533982/posts/Ws5CUnPeRrD
> >
> > It is possible to change it manually in the dconf settings
> > (org.gnome.desktop.background.primary-color &
> > org.gnome.desktop.background.secondary-color), but this seems like it
> > might be something that at least a few of our users might want to do in
> > the control-center rather than having to hack at settings.
>
> Its not very discoverable, but you can drag colors from e.g. the gimp
> color chooser, and drop them on the control-center background chooser.

Wow, that has to be the understatement of the year! Having taken a look at
the background chooser myself when I saw Ryan's email I never would have
thought to do something like that; I think "it's practically impossible to
discover..." is more accurate.

Didn't the background chooser have a proper colour picker in it once?

[Debarshi Ray]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2014 at 10:56:27AM -0500, Ryan Lerch wrote:
> This popped up in the Fedora google+ community, and just wondering if 
> there is a way to be able to set an arbitrary colour as the background. 
> (other than making a bitmap of the colour, and setting the image as the 
> background)

You should be able to drag and drop colours to the chooser dialog in
Settings -> Background from the something like the the GTK+ color
chooser.

This was added (back) in:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689351

However, while trying it now I noticed that it crashes Settings, but the
dnd-ed colour is remembered when you restart it.

Cheers,
Debarshi

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Tue, 2014-11-04 at 10:56 -0500, Ryan Lerch wrote:
> This popped up in the Fedora google+ community, and just wondering if 
> there is a way to be able to set an arbitrary colour as the background. 
> (other than making a bitmap of the colour, and setting the image as the 
> background)
>
> https://plus.google.com/109533309209161533982/posts/Ws5CUnPeRrD
>
> It is possible to change it manually in the dconf settings 
> (org.gnome.desktop.background.primary-color & 
> org.gnome.desktop.background.secondary-color), but this seems like it 
> might be something that at least a few of our users might want to do in 
> the control-center rather than having to hack at settings.

We ought to have a color chooser in this panel, but it really needs
designer attention to be able to pull it off properly as there's not
really any good place to put one right now.

DND is harmless, but neither necessary nor sufficient.

Michael