Note

api.artifex.services is now live! Shaders, Images, Videos and Cubemaps can now be obtained with the in-app media hubs

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.

Supported Engine Modes

• Simple
• Komplex

Supported Channel Buffers

• Shaders
• Images
• Videos
• Cubemaps
• Audio
• QML Scenes
• Recursive Frame Buffer

Important

GLSL Shaders can be manually imported but must be compiled with the qsb tool supplied with Qt. A tool has been provided as ~/.local/share/komplex/tools/stc.py to assist with this process and to process shader importing. Please see the Wiki for more information.

Important

Audio reactivity requires Pipewire be the active audio server

Engine Mode: Simple

The Simple engine mode is meant to use a single generative or manipulative shader that can use up to 4 configurable channel buffers as the wallpaper. Channel buffers can be configured to be other shaders, images, videos, cubemaps, QML scenes and desktop audio capture. For video and images, you have the ability to import directly from the respective Pexels API.

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.

The Komplex engine mode also allows for direct ShaderToy importing through the use of the ShaderToy API. Most ShaderToy functionality is supported, and features a media import function when the shader uses a video as a resource.

Installation (Release Packages)

Arch - AUR

Use your favorite AUR helper to install plasma6-wallpapers-komplex.

Post-installation

In order for the plugin to be registered with Plasma 6, we will need to restart the plasmashell session. In order for the g-streamer backend to take effect, a reboot may be required.

Restart Plasmashell

systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell.service

Installation (manual)

Requirements

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

Instructions

After ensuring your system has all the required packages, run the following commands to clone the repo and enter it's directory.

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

The contents of data/* should be copied to the system

sudo mkdir /usr/share/komplex/
cp -r data/* /usr/share/komplex/

Warning

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 following command to change to the gstreamer backend provided by qt6-multimedia-gstreamer.

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

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

Shaders provided by various artists from ShaderToy (API)

Image and Videos provided by Pexels (API)

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