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
pacman -S sdl2
make
nix-shell -p gnumake SDL2 --command make
guix install paperview
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
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%
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
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
If you are using windows, X11 is not easily supported. Here is a pure Windows alternative using SDL2: