Distributary: my artwork proposal for Debian 14 "forky"

Samuel Henrique (samueloph) October 31, 2026 [debian, artwork]

The Distributary wallpaper split on a diagonal: on the left, the dark version, a gold river forking over dark green land with the Debian logo; on the right, the light version, the same river as green ink on pale paper

In hydrology, a distributary is a channel that forks away from a river and flows on to the sea, the opposite of a tributary. Debian is the river much of the Linux world forks from, so for a release called forky, that is my proposal for its artwork: one river, many forks.

All generated by code. A small Python program grows the river by the rules of real deltas, and renders every wallpaper, login screen, boot splash and GRUB background from it, dark and light, at any resolution: the showcase offers 51 sizes to download, from phones to 8K.

Distributary in its eight colours, Forest, Violet, Midnight, Debian red, Rose on teal, Glacier, Lineage and Silt, each as a dark and a light wallpaper side by side

It comes in eight colours, and with the palette editor you can fork your own: change any colour or option live in your browser, or roll random ones, then download the wallpaper or build the whole theme locally. Have a look at the showcase and at the proposal on the Debian wiki; the source is on Salsa and GitHub.