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Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

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Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#31
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.

It's the same reason I change my icons and desktop theme. I'm gonna stare at this screen for 10+ hours a day, I want it to be beautiful.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#32
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

The only time I ever see it is on the lock screen

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#34
post #31
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the same reason I change my icons and desktop theme. I'm gonna stare at this screen for 10+ hours a day, I want it to be beautiful.

At the cost of usable? IDK about that tradeoff. With the wallpaper specifically, it's always covered, at least on all the computers I use.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#35
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.

See the crabs from bell labs

http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Crabs.pdf

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#36
post #2

So the animated wallpaper scene on linux is pretty bizarre. There are some popular methods out there like calling `feh --fill-bg` continuously in a bash loop but it sends your CPU usage to an astronomical 40% which drains the laptop battery pretty quickly. I couldn't find a reasonable animated desktop wallpaper setter, so I wrote a little utility in 150 lines or so in C that I call from .xinitrc to randomly pick a fa…

for animated stuff I had good results with setting mpv as background. though yours looks like it uses even less CPU, super nice :) will work wonders with https://1041uuu.tumblr.com stuff !

... or at least it would, if I was seeing my desktop background once in a while

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#38
post #2

So the animated wallpaper scene on linux is pretty bizarre. There are some popular methods out there like calling `feh --fill-bg` continuously in a bash loop but it sends your CPU usage to an astronomical 40% which drains the laptop battery pretty quickly. I couldn't find a reasonable animated desktop wallpaper setter, so I wrote a little utility in 150 lines or so in C that I call from .xinitrc to randomly pick a fa…

Did you create those scenes yourself? They look fantastic.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#39
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

I just use a plain black background.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#40
Is there a decent repository for these kind of short animated backgrounds? Ideally pixel graphics like the one in the preview video. I'd like to experiment with this, but a quick duckduckgo search didn't turn up much; some sites were advertising images as animated but they were in fact still images, and most of the others had gifs of varying quality, and weren't even consistently 1080p.
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