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Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

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Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#53
post #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.

Try stock hd video sites like videezy.com. You'll have to convert the hd videos into suitable format yourself though, but that should be easy enough.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#54
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…

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

GNOME has backgrounds which change over the day. That's entirely different from animated though. Reading the GNOME config file, seems the background slowly transitions (fades) from one picture to another. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-backgrounds/-/blob/mast...

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#55
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In wayland it's very simple. You would use surface frame callbacks, which aren't supposed to trigger when the window is fully obscured, minimized, or off-screen on another desktop. This mechanism never seems to have made it back into composited X.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#57

I never saw the point of this, or Active Desktop back in the day. 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…

GitLab has a real dark mode in the preferences now. You need to refresh once you select it. The dark syntax highlighting preference plays well with it.

Not that there is anything wrong with a CLI workflow.

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#58
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

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

One of the very few reasons I miss stacking window managers:)

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#59
when i see some geometric animations often in small badly encoded videos i wish i would know a repository of programs that create these in order to render them onto the background in a pixel perfect manner without wasting too much resources. but i was not able to find some yet :(

Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers

#60
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

>setting mpv as background

how does one do this? Just replace the Feh call with mpv?

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