Dear Debian Desktop Team,

When using desktop-base in Debian with modern desktop environments such as
KDE Plasma 6, the Ceratopsian wallpapers appear twice in the wallpaper
selection menu.
The issue is caused by the presence of two separate symlinks inside
/usr/share/wallpapers/ with different names (ceratopsian and DebianTheme),
both of which point to the same base wallpaper resource (Ceratopsian).
Plasma 6 scans both symlinks independently and treats them as different
entries, resulting in the “Ceratopsian” wallpaper appearing twice in the
wallpaper selection menu.
Additionally, removing the “DebianTheme” symbolic link resolves the
duplication issue, but this results in the wallpapers associated with the
“Debian Breeze” theme (namely “Ceratopsian”) not being installed when the
theme is installed.
Removing the “ceratopsian” symbolic link appears to resolve the issue
completely.

Proposed solution:
Review the structure of the symbolic links in /usr/share/wallpapers/
provided by the desktop-base package to prevent modern wallpaper managers
from indexing identical directories twice.

I am using Debian GNU/Linux 13.6, kernel 6.12.96+deb13-amd64, and libc6
2.41-12+deb13u3.

Adding screenshots to illustrate the duplicate wallpaper entries in KDE
Plasma 6 background selection menu.[image: screenshot.png]

(gnome-control-center) doesn't seem to have this problem. It might be
specific to Plasma, or desktop environments that follow a particular
pattern for enumerating possible wallpapers, or a subset of the
supported desktop enviroments that includes Plasma but not GNOME.

Whichever Plasma component is responsible for listing possible
wallpapers could equally well address this by deduplicating the themes
by their realpath(), or by the contents of their metadata.json, or some
other suitable unique identifier.

Actually, /usr/share/wallpapers/ seems to contain *three* separate
symlinks to ceratopsian: ceratopsian and ceratopsian_wallpaper point to
it directly, and DebianTheme points to it via /etc/alternatives. Perhaps
Plasma is already doing this deduplication, but only for direct
symlinks, and not for symlink-to-a-symlink?

     smcv

Indeed, the phrasing “modern desktop environments” was somewhat general,
since the behavior does depend on exactly how a given desktop environment
scans the file system.

However, shifting the blame for this issue onto KDE Plasma is a weak
argument, since different desktop environments are free to implement
directory scanning in their own way.
The fact that one desktop environment “handles” Debian’s specific structure
does not make other environments faulty. KDE Plasma likely expects unique
items in the wallpaper directory, rather than a tangled web of multiple
layers of symbolic links pointing to the same resource.

The user interacts with the system interface, not the package architecture.
When the same image appears twice in the desktop background selection menu,
it spoils the user experience (UX). The responsibility for maintaining a
clean dataset lies with the package maintainers who compile this list, not
with each graphical environment that attempts to display it.

Shouldn’t you reconsider the structure of `desktop-base` instead of relying
on end-user environments to handle deduplication?

I apologize for any inconsistencies in the text, as I’m using a translation
tool.