Set Animated And Video Wallpapers For Your Linux Desktop

I always love to see my Linux Desktop with beautiful and Elegant wallpapers. I already have tried some desktop wallpaper changer applications such as WallpaperDownloader, and BG-Changer etc. However, those tools are only for setting pictures as wallpapers. Today, I stumbled upon yet another tool to beautify my Linux desktop. Meet Komorebi, a free and open source desktop manager. It allows you to set animated and video wallpapers for your Linux desktop. You can also create your own video and animated wallpapers and set them as well.

Komorebi uses Clutter for its core. Clutter is an open source software library for creating fast, compelling, portable, and dynamic graphical user interfaces. It provides beautiful, smooth, and fast animations. In this brief tutorial, let us see how to install and use Komorebi in Ubuntu.

Install Komorebi on Ubuntu

As of writing this guide, Komorebi is packaged only for DEB-based systems such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint. However, you can install it on other Linux distributions by manually compiling from source.

Download the latest Komorebi version from releases page. As of writing this guide, the latest version was 2.0.

$ wget https://github.com/iabem97/komorebi/releases/download/v2.0/komorebi-2-64-bit.deb

Then, install it as shown below:

$ sudo apt-get install gdebi

$ sudo gdebi komorebi-2-64-bit.deb

Install Komorebi manually from source

For other Linux distributions, you need to download and install required dependencies such as,

• libgtop2-dev,
• libgtk-3-dev,
• gtk+-3.0,
• libgtop-2.0,
• glib-2.0>=2.38,
• gee-0.8,
• libwnck-3.0,
• clutter-gtk-1.0,
• clutter-1.0,
• clutter-gst-3.0,
• cmake,
• and valac.

After installing all dependencies, git clone Komorebi repository using command:

$ git clone https://github.com/iabem97/komorebi.git

Go to the Komorebi directory:

$ cd komorebi

Then, run the following commands to install it.

$ mkdir build && cd build

$ cmake .. && sudo make install

Set Animated And Video Wallpapers For Linux Desktops Using Komorebi

Once installed, launch Komorebi using the application launcher. If you installed it manually from source, go to the Komorebi directory and launch it using command:

$ ./komorebi

As soon as you launched it, Komorebi will automatically set one of wallpaper from its collections.

Set Animated And Video Wallpapers Using Komorebi

To change desktop preferences or your wallpaper, right click anywhere on the desktop to show the menu.

Change desktop preferences

Click Change Wallpaper in the menu and choose any wallpaper from the list.

Change desktop wallpaper

Similarly, to change the desktop preferences, click on the "Preferences" tab next to Wallpapers tab in the above window.

Set Video Wallpapers

Like I said already, we can create our own video wallpapers and set them as desktop wallpaper.

To set video wallpapers, you must install gstreamer1.0-libav package.

On Ubuntu and derivatives, you can install it using command:

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer1.0-libav

Open "Wallpaper Creator" application from your Application launcher. Enter a name for your wallpaper folder. Choose the wallpaper type (video or picture), select wallpaper location and thumbnail location. Click "Next" on the top right corner to continue.

Wallpaper creator

In the next screen, you will have many options to customize the wallpaper.

Customize wallpaper

Congrats! Your new wallpaper has been created and saved in a folder you choose in the first step.

Wallpaper is created

Finally, Copy your wallpaper folder to /System/Resources/Komorebi/ folder.

$ sudo cp -r mywallpaper/ /System/Resources/Komorebi/

Now, right click anywhere on the desktop, choose "Change wallpaper" from the menu and set the newly created wallpaper from the list.

Please note that your desktop performance will decrease, because the video wallpapers will consume more CPU than the normal image wallpapers.

Uninstall

Don't like it? you can uninstall it if you install it the .deb file like below:

$ sudo apt-get remove komorebi

If you manually installed it from source, go to Komorebi/build folder:

$ cd komorebi/build

$ sudo make uninstall

Resource: 

• Komorebi GitHub page