Steam Wallpaper Engine Plugin for Omarchy: Scene, Video, Web, and PipeWire Audio Visualizers

[Azteriisk]

I have spent a lot of time creating web-based wallpapers on Windows with Wallpaper Engine, particularly dynamic canvas and Fourier-based audio visualizers. When moving over to Linux and Wayland, getting those same wallpapers to run in a way that felt native, responsive, and properly integrated into the desktop environment was something I really wanted to solve.

To bring Wallpaper Engine over to Omarchy in a clean and native-feeling way, I built omarchy-wallpaper-engine, a standalone plugin and runner designed specifically for Omarchy and Hyprland.

Repository: https://github.com/Azteriisk/omarchy-wallpaper-engine

What it does:

1. Dual-Backend Engine for All Wallpaper Types:

• Scene & Video Wallpapers: Handled via linux-wallpaperengine using native OpenGL shaders, particle meshes, and hardware-accelerated MPV video decoding.
• Web / HTML5 Wallpapers: Powered by a custom Wayland layer-shell client (wpe-layer-web.py) built on WebKitGTK and GtkLayerShell. Surfaces render on the bottom layer behind all windows and the IDE without window management hacks.

2. Real-Time PipeWire Audio Visualization:

• Uses PipeWire to stream live desktop output audio through a 1024-point stereo FFT analyzer.
• Feeds 128 logarithmic frequency bands into window.wallpaperRegisterAudioListener at 40 FPS.
• Audio capture is bound to output sink monitors with stream.capture.sink=true to ensure microphone inputs are isolated and do not trigger the visualizer.

3. In-Widget Live Parameter Controls:

• Features a collapsible settings drawer directly inside the top bar widget.
• Allows live tuning of wallpaper parameters (3D tilt angles, wave counts, gain multipliers, atmospheric fog, and preset themes) over local Unix domain sockets in real time.
• Uses custom slider controls that isolate mouse-wheel scrolling so you can scroll the widget list without accidentally moving sliders.

4. Omarchy Desktop Integration:

• Wallpapers can be scoped to specific Omarchy themes (such as Matte Black, Gruvbox, Tokyo Night).
• Assigned wallpapers appear with thumbnails in the standard Super + Ctrl + Space background switcher grid.
• Selecting a static wallpaper cleanly terminates running engine processes to conserve hardware resources.

Installation:

git clone https://github.com/Azteriisk/omarchy-wallpaper-engine.git ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/azterisk.wallpaper-engine
cd ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/azterisk.wallpaper-engine
./install.sh

Current Performance Notes & Known Caveats:

While Scene and Video wallpapers run at native refresh rates (120Hz-240Hz), web-based wallpapers with heavy 2D canvas blurs have notable performance differences on Linux compared to Windows. On Windows, Chromium and Direct2D execute canvas shadowBlur directly on GPU compute shaders. On Linux, Cairo and WebKitGTK fall back to CPU software rasterization for large Gaussian blur radii, which can impact framerates if blur settings are pushed too high.

For complex web visualizers, keeping blur or bloom properties at lower values maintains smooth 60-120 FPS playback.

Feedback & Contributions:

The project is open source and contributions are welcome. I would love feedback on:

• WebGL or shader-based blur bridges to bypass Cairo 2D canvas software blurs.
• Packaging improvements (such as an AUR PKGBUILD).
• General stability across different multi-monitor and scaling configurations.

Feel free to try it out and share your thoughts or open a PR on GitHub.