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Like wallpaper engine. I know there are already ways to draw gifs and videos and xml scenes to the wallpaper, but it breaks widgets or vice versa, and best case scenario it's inconvenient and unintuitive. It would be best if a live wallpaper system was just directly integrated into the wallpaper settings UI, the way it is on android now. In theory this could be pretty small and is well worth it. It seems like live wallpapers will be considered a basic, fundamental DE feature soon enough. Even the replacement stereo in my car came with live wallpapers right out of the box, and it's a $200 rockchip head unit. and of course, mac OS uses live wallpapers by default now.
I think most users will come to expect this functionality so it would be a big asset if plasma was among the first to integrate it into the wallpaper picker system. mac OS has live wallpapers but doesn't allow easy user selection and development of a variety of wallpapers. android has live wallpapers and allows development & user selection of tons of different wallpapers, but it doesn't have any interface for basic customization, like playback rate, tiling/scale/pan, nor any API for users to customize elements of the wallpaper itself even if the developer of the wallpaper intends for it. as far as i'm aware, only wallpaper engine has all those features in a single GUI, but it's not integrated with windows' actual wallpaper and it's not free. for example, wallpaper engine hosts several clones of mac OS mojave's little 24-hour dynamic wallpaper. the image of the desert sand dune. one of them is pretty sophisticated and allows the user to control a lot of custom properties that would only apply to this specific wallpaper. user can customize whether the wallpaper determines your location via the OS' network location reporting, or by the user-defined, static location. it uses that location to dictate what time of day it is in the wallpaper of course. and it lets you define the times at which sunset and sunrise begin, the time update interval, and the animation smoothness. the only thing missing is daylight savings time. anyway, point is that none of those properties are defined in wallpaper engine itself, they're defined by the wallpaper, but wallpaper engine provides a really simple, accessible UI for customizing them. and even though the wallpaper itself is a ripoff of mac OS mojave's default wallpaper, it has tons of customization options while mac OS has none. so there's a golden opportunity to basically instantly rise to the top of this ladder, since all the competition is compromised in some way. apple's system is completely locked down and restricted to a few predefined wallpapers. android's system is easy to use and has a huge selection but zero customization features. windows just has no bundled live wallpaper system to begin with. and wallpaper engine is doing nearly everything right, but it's unpolished, not free, platform exclusive, and unknown to the vast majority of computer users. realistically, some linux desktop environment will probably be the first to bring this rich functionality to the masses for free. microsoft and apple don't seem to have anything in the works. and to me it seems like a natural fit for KDE more than any other desktop. anyway thanks for reading my suggestion lol |
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So distilling this down to what specific changes you'd want to be made in Plasma: You want to be able to select between available live wallpapers from the wallpaper selector (after selecting Wallpaper Type: Live Wallpaper). Once selected, there should be a way to configure the selected live wallpaper.
Of course the options available will depend on the chosen live wallpaper (possibly the engine/plugin used to present them) as different ones will have different options available for configuration. Some will be essentially slide-shows or videos on loop and would have options for selecting the image(s) and/or video(s) as well as speed/duration. Others such as Hunyango and Haenau which come built-in to Plasma are generated based on some default image assets and/or additional configurable parameters.
airdrik, proud to be a member of KDE forums since 2008-Dec.
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