panduska / paperview

A high performance X11 animated wallpaper setter

PAPERVIEW

A high performance animated desktop background setter for X11 that won't set your CPU on fire, drain your laptop battery, or lower ya vidya game FPS.

Video of the above screenshot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZTiA885bWM

Build

arch

pacman -S sdl2
make

nix

nix-shell -p gnumake SDL2 --command make

guix

guix install paperview

Use

Command line:

./paperview FOLDER SPEED

A lower SPEED number will result in a faster frame rate. Only bitmap files are supported. Creating your own bitmap folders from gifs requires imagemagick. For example, creating a castle folder from castle.gif which you downloaded:

mkdir castle
mv castle.gif castle
cd castle
convert -coalesce castle.gif out.bmp
rm castle.gif

Performance

Running on a Thinkpad X230 from 2012 at 1920x1080 and 60fps:

intel_gpu_time ./paperview castle 5

user: 1.904135s, sys: 0.357277s, elapsed: 100.458648s, CPU: 2.3%, GPU: 11.7%

Known Issues

Picom

Picom (and possibly simliar compositors) seem to overwrite the base root X11 window. A pure X11 workaround can be found here:

https://gist.github.com/AlecsFerra/ef1cc008990319f3b676eb2d8aa89903

XFCE

According to andreldm, for Xfce users, xfdesktop and compositing have to be disabled before running paperview:

xfdesktop -Q && xfconf-query --channel xfwm4 --property /general/use_compositing --type bool --set false

Windows

If you are using windows, X11 is not easily supported. Here is a pure Windows alternative using SDL2:

https://github.com/TrAyZeN/sdl-wallpaper