One of my biggest disappointments after moving to Linux was discovering that DisplayFusion doesn’t support Linux. DisplayFusion is hands-down the best way to manage multiple monitors on Windows and is definitely worth upgrading to the pro version. But this post isn’t meant to be a product endorsement, it’s meant to show how to set two separate wallpapers on Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon.

From what I’ve read on the Internet, it seems that other desktop environments like KDE can do this out of the box, but Cinnamon can’t. So the easiest way is to install nitrogen. Nitrogen should work on any desktop environment that uses GNOME as a base. Just do sudo apt-get install nitrogen in your terminal and you should be all set to go. After installation, type nitrogen and hit enter to start the program.

A window should pop up with five buttons at the bottom. Click on Preferences, then click Add to add your wallpaper directories. You can only add one directory at a time, by the way. Once done adding the directories, click on OK and you should see thumbnails of your wallpapers fill the window. To set a wallpaper to a monitor, click on your desired image, then click on the second button at the bottom (which says “Full Screen”, “Screen 1”, or “Screen 2” for two monitors) and select which monitor you want the image on. The first button allows you to choose how the image will be displayed (automatically sized, scaled to fit the whole image, tiled, etc.). Then click on Apply. Then repeat the process for the other screen. The “Full Screen” option spans the image across both monitors which is great for dual-monitor wallpapers.

Now that you know how to set separate wallpapers, how about some new wallpapers? The two best wallpaper websites, in my opinion, are Desktop Nexus and The Paper Wall.