komplex/README.md

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

*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: 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 (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

Shader import functionality provided by ShaderToy API

Image and Video import functionality provided by Pexels API

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