Komplex Wallpaper Engine

Komplex Wallpaper Engine is an advanced wallpaper engine for the KDE Plasma 6 Desktop Environment that allows the use of complex shader arrangements as a Wallpaper. Shader arrangements are a collection of shaders and various channel buffers that the shader is intended to manipulate, resulting in visually stunning live motion and reactive wallpapers.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/456bedfc-1d18-4520-9340-ab7d0f0a8f98

Supported Engine Modes

• ShaderToy
• Komplex

Supported Channel Buffers

• Shaders*
• Images
• Videos
• Cubemaps**
• Audio***

*Shaders must be compiled with the qsb tool supplied with Qt. It may be available through your distribution's package manager. Follow the instructions in /tools/README.md to compile shaders for use with Qt.

**The Cubemaps provided in this package are released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License and were obtained from Humus

***Audio reactivity requires KDE to be using Pipewire

Engine Mode: ShaderToy

The ShaderToy Engine mode is designed to work with most* of the pages on ShaderToy.com and is the easiest to use and configure as it can be setup via the settings panel. Simply select a manipulative shader as the main output and setup the iChannels the shader supports. Try feeding it a generative shader!

*Volumetric and audio channels are not currently supported, but are in development.

ShaderToy import functionality is currently in development

Engine Mode: Komplex

The Komplex engine mode allows for a much more complex wallpaper experience. Instead of a simple configuration scheme, the Komplex engine mode uses a shader pack file that can contain it's own images, cubemaps, videos and shaders. This shader pack must contain a pack.json file that describes the output shader, resolution, speed and channel buffers 0-3. Each channel buffer can have channel buffers 0-3, which can in-turn have channel buffers 0-3 and so on. This allows near infinite arrangement complexity, only limited by hardware and reasoning.

Example pack.json file:

{
    "author": "DigitalArtifex",
    "name": "Test",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "description": "Test",
    "license": "GPLv3+",
    "engine": "shadertoys",
    "id": "sdE3sx",

    "type": 2,
    "source": "./shaders/video-glitch-extra.frag.qsb",
    "speed": 0.14,

    "channel0":
    {
        "type": 2,
        "source": "./shaders/edge-detect-greyscale.frag.qsb",

        "resolution_x": 1920,
        "resolution_y": 1080,
        "resolution_scale": 1.0,
        "time_scale": 1.0,
        "mouse_scale": 1.0,

        "channel0":
        {
            "type": 2,
            "source": "./shaders/Glow-City.frag.qsb",

            "resolution_x": 1920,
            "resolution_y": 1080,
            "resolution_scale": 1.0,
            "time_scale": 1.0,
            "mouse_scale": 1.0
        }
    }
}

Installation (manual)

Contents of the data directory should be placed in ~/.local/komplex/

Requirements

• qt6-base
• qt6-multimedia
• qt6-multimedia-gstreamer*
• qt6-declarative
• qt6-imageformats
• qt6-quick3d
• qt6-shadertools
• ECM (extra-cmake-modules)
• plasma-desktop
• cmake

Instructions

After ensuring your system has all the required packages, run the following commands

git clone https://github.com/DigitalArtifex/kde-komplex-wallpaper-engine.git
cd kde-komplex-wallpaper-engine
cmake -S ./ -B ./build
cmake --build ./build
cmake --install ./build

After installation, it is likely that you may experience scan lines and other artifacts when using the Video Channel Buffer. This is due to the default backend being FFMPEG, which is known to have such issues with Qt. You can correct this issue by using the gstreamer backend provided by qt6-multimedia-gstreamer.

sudo echo "export QT_MEDIA_BACKEND=gstreamer" >> /etc/profile

This step is automatically executed by the Arch installation package.

Installation (Release Packages)

Currently only Arch packages are available at this time. I am working towards Debian and Gentoo releases as well.

Credits

This project was inspired by KDE Shader Wallpaper, Wallpaper Engine and others. It uses code that was originally part of KDE Shader Wallpaper.

This project uses icons donated by Icons8

To support me, this project or to find Linux themed hot sauces, you can Buy me a coffee