41–50 of 70 posts
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.
Though it doesn't augment anything, nor does it look particularly pretty...
Isn't it possible to use mpv for this? mpv --wid=0 Causes mpv to draw to the root window. I even found a guide: https://github.com/digip/linux-video-wallpaper Not sure what the performance is like though.
That said, in both cases transparency of things like terminals is going to be very resource hungry.
Also, if you're doing the --wid=0, throw in --loop there too. :)
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…
I am honestly confused why, years ago, I spent hours searching for the perfect wallpaper on the internet. And why I spent even more hours making my own, 20 years ago.
Nowadays I usually set one I like when I install the machine and maybe change it 1-4 years later. Is this what growing up feels like? :(
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…
Is this true when you have a loop that sleeps for 5 minutes before calling it again? I've always set my wallpapers this way. It's also similar to what I do on Sway. The only alternative I've found is simple enough and still works is using an ad-hoc systemd timer task.
Edit: nevermind, I forgot this is about animated wallpapers. I use a while loop + feh for setting a static wallpaper that changes every 5 minutes.
But the last three releases of Fedora and Gnome have had a sort of animated wallpaper. It's actually just an XML file that defines times and image files for each time. And it's used to darken the wallpaper when the sun sets.
I use the default one that ships with Fedora but the XML file is straightforward and it's simple to make your own.
One thing that will make me use more advanced desktop features is definitely alleviating eye strain.
In that vein, using a CLI tool to check up on Gitlab pipelines is another recent development. Switching back and forth between a dark solarized terminal and a bright Gitlab Firefox window was becoming annoying.
(I know there are lots of CSS tricks you can do in FF to force dark styles on websites but I try to keep my setup as vanilla as possible to ease its management.)
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/
I have 3 screens. Amount of pixels that show my desktop: 0 I am honestly confused why, years ago, I spent hours searching for the perfect wallpaper on the internet. And why I spent even more hours making my own, 20 years ago. Nowadays I usually set one I like when I install the machine and maybe change it 1-4 years later. Is this what growing up feels like? :(
The style of the wallpapers and animations reminds me of the Windows 95 Plus theme pack. There was something that animated once every few minutes, but I can't recall what exactly…
There used to be a way of displaying websites on the desktop in windows 2000. “Live desktop” I think it was called[1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_DreamScene
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop?wprov=sfti1
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