We have a Winner!

The default wallpaper for Plasma 5.16 is Ice Cold by Santiago Cézar.

There were several very high-quality entries in the running, so much so the judges had to go to a second round because it was so hard to decide. Although there can only be one default wallpaper, users can have the best of both worlds, as any entry can be downloaded for personal use and some of the other submissions may be finding their way into Plasma 5.16's additional wallpaper collection or later versions of KDE's flagship desktop.

We would like to congratulate Santiago for the win and thank all the participants for the effort and beautiful graphics you submitted for the competition.

Prize

Our friends at Slimbook have kindly donated a Slimbook One v2 as a prize for the winning participant. The One v2 is an eco-friendly, compact machine, measuring only 12.4 x 12.8 x 3.7 cm. It comes with an i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and is capable of outputting video in glorious 4K. Naturally, your One will come decked out with the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.16 desktop, your spectacular wallpaper, and a bunch of great software made by KDE.

Help and Feedback

You can ask the VDG for help and feedback any time during the competition! Just join the #kde-vdg channel on Matrix or the freenode IRC channel (which is bridged to the VDG Telegram room, if you prefer Telegram).

Also check out the discussion in the competition's subforum to get tips and feedback.

Previous Wallpapers for Inspiration

Previous wallpapers, made by the artist Ken Vermette, can be found on this page. This is just meant to help you design the wallpaper, and following the style is not mandatory. Here are the most recent ones: