How to Change Login Screen Background in Ubuntu

This is how you can get rid of those lifeless login screen background in Ubuntu and set a nice picture to welcome you each time you log on.

I, always think that when you boot up your system, a nice login screen should greet you. That itself set the context of your upcoming work or activity that you are about to do. Although, I am not a Windows fan, but I admire how Windows 10 login background changes every day from Bing wallpapers, and it looks nice.

A while back, we covered how to change login background in Fedora and elementary OS. And now this guide explains how you change it in vanilla Ubuntu with GNOME Shell.

Login screen background is part of display manager property. This guide uses a script in GitHub created by a user to make it seamless and easy for average user. Otherwise, you have to change the Gnome Display Manager (gdm) CSS files manually after extracting the .gresource file, then compile it – which is complicated in general.

Ubuntu Login screen - before change — Ubuntu Login screen – before change

Change Login Background in Ubuntu

Open a terminal (press CTRL+ALT+T)

Download the GitHub repo.

wget github.com/thiggy01/change-gdm-background/raw/master/change-gdm-background

Note: If you do not have wget, install it using sudo apt install wget

Change the permission of the script to make it executable

chmod +x change-gdm-background

Then change the login background wallpaper in Ubuntu using the below command. Change the path of your image.

sudo ./change-gdm-background ~/Pictures/tree.jpg

This step might require libglib2.0-dev package, which will be installed automatically. This is required to extract/compile the .gresource.

And after installation, it would prompt you to restart gdm. Press N, to be on the safe side.

Logout and you can see the changed background in Ubuntu.
If you are not seeing the change, try restarting your system and then try to log in.

Restore the stock login screen

The script also provides a feature to revert the stock login screen. It takes a backup of your .gresource file before changing it. So, from the terminal, simply run below to restore the original login screen.