Backlayer

Animated wallpapers
for the Linux desktop.

Backlayer is an animated wallpaper runtime for Linux — a daemon, Wayland layer-shell surfaces, dedicated renderers, and a native Scene Composer. Hyprland is the first supported compositor, with broader Linux support as the goal.

Get started View on GitHub
Rust wgpu Wayland layer-shell Tauri + React

Wallpaper kinds

Four native renderer paths

img

Image

Static wallpapers with per-assignment fit controls: cover, contain, stretch, or center.

vid

Video

Video wallpapers through a dedicated video-runner using ffmpeg and ffprobe, with libmpv on the roadmap.

wgsl

Shader

WGSL shaders rendered with wgpu — static or animated with a built-in time/resolution uniform block.

scn

Scene

A real-time 2D scene graph with sprites, effects, and GPU-native particles, authored in the Scene Composer.

Scene Composer

Turn a still image into a living wallpaper

A full-screen editor for native scene wallpapers: sprite nodes, glow, vignette, scanlines and fog effects, plus particle emitters with shapes, burst emission, over-life curves and tint. Scenes save as single-file .backlayer assets.

tap nodes to toggle

Runtime

A deliberate runtime, not a media player behind windows

Per-monitor assignment

backlayerd maps stable monitor identifiers to wallpapers, surviving output-name changes across reconnects.

Input passthrough

Wallpapers live on background layer-shell surfaces — your desktop input is never intercepted.

Power aware

Pause on fullscreen, pause on battery, and FPS limiting are runtime rules from day one.

Renderer supervision

Dedicated renderer processes per wallpaper, supervised and restarted by the daemon on failure.

systemd --user recovery

A bundled user service gives login autostart and daemon recovery for day-to-day reliability.

Single-file assets

Native wallpapers pack into portable .backlayer files with an asset-relative manifest.

Quick start

Running in three commands

Requires Hyprland on Wayland, a Rust toolchain, Node.js, pnpm, and ffmpeg/ffprobe for video wallpapers. An Arch package layout and AUR-ready files ship under packaging/.

Install dependencies 
pnpm install
Run the daemon 
cargo run -p backlayerd -- --serve
Run the manager UI 
pnpm ui:tauri:dev

For login-time autostart, enable the bundled systemd --user unit. See docs/install.md for the full flow.

KDE Plasma 6 EXPERIMENTAL

A working wallpaper plugin lets Plasma render image, video, and simplified scene wallpapers through Plasma's native wallpaper system — the first step beyond wlroots compositors.

Workshop import OPT-IN

Behind BACKLAYER_ENABLE_WORKSHOP=1, local Wallpaper Engine items can be imported and classified as video, scene, or web. Compatibility is partial — native assets are the primary direction.