Coming soon: Add a different wallpaper for each virtual desk for a more personal touch

Virtual Desks rock. Plain and simple. Chrome OS makes great use of them, and Google continues to improve upon them at a rapid pace. Today, Dinsan over at Chrome Story discovered a Chromium Gerrit commit that shows Chromebook users will soon have the ability to change their wallpaper not once for the entire device, but once per desk! This feature recently became available on Windows, and it’s a nice addition to Google’s laptop OS as a means of adding another personal touch to the user experience.

Add a flag for per desk wallpaper

Flag appears in chrome://flags as #enable-per-desk-wallpaper

Chromium Gerrit

While there’s no flag available to toggle yet, you can see very clearly that once enabled, users who set their wallpaper on the primary desk and who have multiple active desks enabled will not see the same wallpaper overtake the other desks. For people like me who use multi-user login on our Chromebooks, this may not be such a big deal as each profile can already have its own unique wallpaper, but I personally use virtual desks in addition to this, and for one persona, I generally have several projects or relationships I swap between within a day that relate to it. Adding a personal touch is more of a nice-to-have and less of a necessity, but hey, having it is still better than it being absent, right?

Dinsan believes that the Enable Per Desk Wallpaper flag will likely be enabled over the next few days in Chrome OS Canary, and I’ll try it out the moment that occurs. For most people though, this feature is probably a ways off, as it still needs to be worked out and all the bugs need to be squashed. Then, it will make its way to the Beta channel before finally heading to the Stable, out-of-the-box experience where most Chromebook owners reside.

Now, the only question is whether or not you find this interesting and useful, and more importantly, which wallpapers will you choose for each of your desks. Let me know in the comments below if you use your own custom wallpapers, or if you simply swap between those that are built into the operating system.

Google has recently added several new collections to choose from, but if I’m honest, the selection is getting a bit stale. What would be incredible is if Google added a way to search Google Images right through the wallpaper picker to find and set new wallpapers! As you may recall, Google Photos integration is still on its way to the picker, so there’s that to look forward to as well.