Animated backgrounds not so much, but I really miss screensavers.
Of course they make no sense these days. Still, I liked the interesting displays while my workstation was left to its own thoughts.
Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers
61–70 of 70 posts
Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
mpv foo.mp4 --wid=0Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers
#63You can use the binaries from xscreensaver as moving backgrounds. If you execute them directly they'll write to the root window.
Example:
$ /usr/lib/xscreensaver/moire2 -rootRe: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers
#64I 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 mostly work in a terminal, developing in a text editor, and have my terminal background set to 80% opaque so that I can see my background.
Every 15 minutes I pull a random image from /r/earthporn. I enjoy having a "window" into the world :-)
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/fkXYD07
Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers
#65When my main computer was Linux laptop, I used xplanet as my desktop background. World clock, basic weather.. This was in 2003. It would get lots of interest when I was working in public places. Which is why, somewhere over Greenland, a flight attendant came by and very quietly said to me, “I noticed you work on outer space stuff. We just got word over radio that the Space Shuttle blew up.” :-( Very strange that the…
Xplanet is the only animated wallpaper I've even seen used. Most people would try it back in the early 2000 and then come to the conclusion that it wasn't worth the CPU cycles after a few minutes.
You can do live wallpaper with xscreensaver
set XSCREENSAVER_WINDOW
'-root' often works just as well
ex: /usr/lib/X11/xscreensaver/molecule -root
will start molecule on the root window
Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers
#66When my main computer was Linux laptop, I used xplanet as my desktop background. World clock, basic weather.. This was in 2003. It would get lots of interest when I was working in public places. Which is why, somewhere over Greenland, a flight attendant came by and very quietly said to me, “I noticed you work on outer space stuff. We just got word over radio that the Space Shuttle blew up.” :-( Very strange that the…
Xplanet is the only animated wallpaper I've even seen used. Most people would try it back in the early 2000 and then come to the conclusion that it wasn't worth the CPU cycles after a few minutes.
You can do live wallpaper with xscreensaver
To quote the man page:
XSCREENSAVER_WINDOW Passed to sub-programs to indicate the ID of the window on which they should draw. This is necessary on Xinerama/RANDR systems where multiple physical monitors share a single X11 "Screen".
-root often works just as well.
Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers
#67I 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.
Wow, thank you! The pipeline output is still a bit bad contrast but it's so much better.
Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers
#68I 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 mostly work in a terminal, developing in a text editor, and have my terminal background set to 80% opaque so that I can see my background. Every 15 minutes I pull a random image from /r/earthporn. I enjoy having a "window" into the world :-) Screenshot: https://imgur.com/fkXYD07
I admit, that's pretty sweet.
Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>In wayland it's very simple
This seems to be the trend
Re: Show HN: High performance X11 animated wallpapers
#70So 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
True that, MPV is solid. Paperview gives me ~3% cpu usage and ~9% GPU usage on an old x230, while MPV gives me 40% cpu usage for a similar mp4. MPV works great on desktops with mp4s, while paperview is great for laptops and battery life if 15 frame gifs are being rendered (pixel art, of course!)