Hello everyone! I'd like to thank everyone for their amazing wallpaper submissions. I'm one of the judges, and there are so many contenders that we have had a hard time picking a winner! So we decided to do a quick round two with our six top choices, and give their authors two more days to hear more feedback and polish their entries to a mirror sheen.

The finalists are:

- Altum: viewtopic.php?f=312&t=160970&p=417963
- Flow: viewtopic.php?f=312&t=160935&p=417964
- Ice Cold: viewtopic.php?f=312&t=160809&p=417965
- Kauil: viewtopic.php?f=312&t=160813&p=417967
- Matterhorn: viewtopic.php?f=312&t=160623&p=417968
- Onyx: viewtopic.php?f=312&t=160979&p=417969

I'd like to congratulate both the finalists and everyone else for their outstanding entries. The KDE community includes some amazing artistic talent!

How is Aeropolis not in this list? What made the judges rule it out? The third version especially looks good and represents KDE's ideology well. It is also familiar in tone to the users, not to radical, but introduces fresh elements. Just like the development of KDE software. It generally remains the same but becomes better and gets fresh new features every release. The ideas behind the wallpaper are clear and detailed.
I am curious what ruled it out. Could you please explain to me?

KoMa111 wrote:How is Aeropolis not in this list?

Because the secret panel of judges decided that adding the same design twice (Onyx is just a flipped version of Altum with different colors) is the way to go.

The real question is why they think the public can't be trusted to vote on all candidates that meet the legal requirements. Fedora uses https://github.com/fedora-infra/nuancier since years to do that.

KAMiKAZOW wrote:

KoMa111 wrote:How is Aeropolis not in this list?

Because the secret panel of judges decided that adding the same design twice (Onyx is just a flipped version of Altum with different colors) is the way to go.

...yeah.

The real question is why they think the public can't be trusted to vote on all candidates that meet the legal requirements. Fedora uses https://github.com/fedora-infra/nuancier since years to do that.

Open voting is at strong risk of being influenced by trolls, and that really might be a problem. Also, it's vulnerable to people making multiple accounts or competitors asking friends to vote. Libreoffice recently had many problems doing a competition through public vote.

niccolove wrote:Open voting is at strong risk of being influenced by trolls, and that really might be a problem. Also, it's vulnerable to people making multiple accounts or competitors asking friends to vote. Libreoffice recently had many problems doing a competition through public vote.

And Fedora doesn't. Since years.

KAMiKAZOW wrote:Because the secret panel of judges decided that adding the same design twice (Onyx is just a flipped version of Altum with different colors) is the way to go.

I cannot understand this decision. I am hoping for Nate to provide a detailed explanation on why did Aeropolis fail after complying with his suggestions on time. Instead, Ice Cold is among the finalists, which goes against the rule "be more abstract than literal", and two designs from the same person, Onyx and Altum, which are essentially the same and they are both centered (which was advised against to mitigate claustrophobic effect). Whereas Aeropolis reflects the thoughts behind KDE, and keeps with the tradition of the last few wallpapers while introducing fresh new elements.

KAMiKAZOW wrote:The real question is why they think the public can't be trusted to vote on all candidates that meet the legal requirements. Fedora uses https://github.com/fedora-infra/nuancier since years to do that.

The problem with trolls and fake accounts exists, and KDE is a more popular and more community-oriented project than Fedora, so the risk is way higher.
It would be complicated to implement measures to filter out such noise, but a hybrid system could be established where community votes take part in the decision-making, but the final decision is made by a panel of judges.

Hey everyone. I want to mention that the judges panel was by no means secret. While it's true that we didn't actively publicize that information, it's all publicly visible at https://phabricator.kde.org/T10875. Ultimately we chose based on a variety of criteria, but what it came down to was that we all just liked Ice cold a lot! Aeropolis was a very strong contender but we all felt that the D20 on the right side was kind of distracting, and while it was very good, nobody had really fallen in love with it. If you think Aeropolis is better, you're totally free to use it yourself. I've added several of the wallpaper entries to my personal wallpaper folder because of how much I liked them.

I also want to mention that there was no set limit for the number of contenders for round two so it's not like Onyx was stealing anyone's place. The whole round two bit was something we kind of improvised at the last minute and I don't doubt it would have been done better. In fact if you think the competition could have been run better in general... you're right! This was our first time doing something like this and we learned a lot about the process. If we do it again for Plasma 5.17, we'll be incorporating lessons we learned this time. And ultimately, it's just a wallpaper. We'll have another bite at the apple in 4 months.

Thanks for participating, everyone!