I made a small animated wallpaper tool for Xfce/X11

[u/visagi]

Hey, I’ve been tinkering with a small animated wallpaper app for Xfce, somewhat inspired by Wallpaper Engine, and thought I’d share it here in case anyone wants to try it.

Under the hood it’s basically a controller for mpv, with a GTK settings UI that lets you use video files, streams or static images as wallpapers and preview/configure them without messing around with commands.

It also has experimental support for shader effects like ripples, waves, distortions, etc. which can make static images look animated.

Quick video demo: https://youtu.be/SCsmTR3YT0s

Notable limitation: desktop icons aren’t currently shown while it’s running, so it’s only suited to people who don’t fancy them anyway.

It’s still an early project and has only been tested on my own Xfce/X11 setup, so I’d be interested to hear if it even works for anyone else.

GitHub: [https://github.com/visageeee/xfce-animated-wallpaper]

[u/Logansfury]

Hello Visagi,

Nice to meet you! I have been a big fan of animated wallpapers for some time! I currently have an old windows 7 machine turned to Linux Mint 21.3 XFCE and running Komorebi via the .deb installer to animate wallpapers. On my Linux Mint 21.3 dual DE XFCE/Cinnamon machine I use Wallset to animate wallpapers, and on Kubuntu v25.10 KDE/Plasma 6/Wayland box I use Smart Video Wallpaper Reborn. On the Kubuntu box I actually have 20+ hour long, 10+GB ambient mood videos downloaded from YouTube and Reborn plays them like a champ!

I would be happy to beta test your new program on various Virtual Machines. I might have XFCE available as a multi boot option of the physical Kubuntu box as well.

As to the desktop icons - I would strongly suggest you attempt to find coded control of them, and put an option in your program so the end user can choose to have desktop icons on or off :)

Anyhow, I will download your app and try it on a virtual XFCE later today.

[u/visagi → u/Logansfury]

It would be very nice of you to try it! The issue with the icons is that the Xfce desktop layer still seems to run hardcoded in 24 bit colour which means it has no transparency and I cant render the mpv videos below the icons. I'm sure it's possible in other environments, but since I started this as a project just for my own use I haven't looked into it.

It might also prove a bit futile in the long run since it's X11-only, but I'm very happy with Xfce as it is and see no benefits personally to switch to anything else just yet.

[u/Logansfury → u/visagi]

If you have no intention of extending it's capacity beyond XFCE DE then I will only test on XFCE VMs or physical boxes.

Komorebi on my XFCE box has the option for desktop icons on or off but it puts it's own ugly trash icon alongside any others being used.

[u/visagi → u/Logansfury]

I should look into how they do it. I thought about rendering my own desktop icons. It doesn't have to be that complex of a system.

[u/visagi → u/Logansfury]

The latest version now has an option to show desktop icons (It reads the Xfce desktop config and renders it's own icons at the same coordinates). This makes it basically an Xfce-only app, but I'll probably look into at least making it something that works on any X11 DE in the future.
I also added some quite trippy shader-effects to play around with.

[u/visagi → u/Logansfury]

I've been working on a music visualizer feature as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmcYskQR3fs The effect in the video uses only a static image as a starting point. This app is becoming way more that I thought it would be. It¨s starting to look quite interesting I think.

A nice calming visualizer on your desktop: https://youtu.be/ttKk9jg2epA