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Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

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Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#11
post #4

I love the focus on reducing CPU, GPU, and battery consumption... but it's still going to be distracting.

Yeah. I don't mean to be disrespectful to the OP, but what's the point of having wallpapers, anyway? Distraction is one thing, but it's also obstructed when you open a large window. I can kind of understand having a screensaver with a beautiful picture, but today screensavers are things of the past.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#12
most of xscreensaver's hacks will use the root window if you ask them too.

I'm using GLava [1] to put an audio spectrograph up on one side of my desktop, i run it with windowed games and transparency and so on and its never more than a 5% of CPU that I've ever seen.

[1] https://github.com/jarcode-foss/glava

no link for xscreensaver, jwz doesn't like hacker news

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#14
Live wallpapers would be much more compelling if the background had context-awareness of what was in the foreground and could interact and animate in a way that augmented the foreground apps instead of just being pretty. Maybe with smart people, future OSes will make that possible.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really it should be something built in to the DE. You need it to stop rendering when the background is covered.

You can accomplish this with straight X11, no need for the DE to be aware of it.

I don't think that's so trivial in a composited world. IIRC once upon a time you could easily get a viewable state from the X server for windows, but with compositing xorg made it basically always true.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#16
post #14

Live wallpapers would be much more compelling if the background had context-awareness of what was in the foreground and could interact and animate in a way that augmented the foreground apps instead of just being pretty. Maybe with smart people, future OSes will make that possible.

Yes, maybe with a little sheep that walked around your windows and teetered over the edges...

https://adrianotiger.github.io/desktopPet/

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#17
I used to care about my desktop background. But as I've gotten older I find the only time I see it is when I close every window, and sometimes I can go for weeks without closing every window. So now I just leave it as the default because I look at it <1% of the time anyway

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#18
post #4

I love the focus on reducing CPU, GPU, and battery consumption... but it's still going to be distracting.

Doesn't the example video show all four cores mostly hovering at around 40-50% CPU usage (with occasional dips to 10-20%)?

What else was the machine doing at the time?

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#19
post #17

I used to care about my desktop background. But as I've gotten older I find the only time I see it is when I close every window, and sometimes I can go for weeks without closing every window. So now I just leave it as the default because I look at it <1% of the time anyway

Yup, its ctrl-alt-t the moment DE loads.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#20
post #11
post #4

I love the focus on reducing CPU, GPU, and battery consumption... but it's still going to be distracting.

Yeah. I don't mean to be disrespectful to the OP, but what's the point of having wallpapers, anyway? Distraction is one thing, but it's also obstructed when you open a large window. I can kind of understand having a screensaver with a beautiful picture, but today screensavers are things of the past.

They look good in /g/ and Reddit desktop threads.
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