Linux Candy: Hidamari is fun video wallpaper for Linux

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Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We’re only featuring open-source software in this series.

If you spend all day embroiled in political in-fighting, battling red tape nonsense, coding an innovative program in Python, sit in countless meetings wishing you were relaxing on a Caribbean island, you’ll need some light relief at the end of the day. And what better way by making your desktop environment a bit more fun.

Hidamari is a Python-based app that offers video wallpaper for Linux and a bit more besides. It’s free and open source software.

Installation

Installation of Linux programs is often very straightforward these days (with the exception of some self-hosted web apps and machine learning software). Hidamari is a breeze in this regard. We evaluated the program using a Flatpak, an open source containerized package format similar to Snap. While Snap relies on a central repository for software, Flatpak can be installed from different sources. The primary source is Flathub.

Install Hidamari with the command:

$ flatpak install flathub io.github.jeffshee.Hidamari

We can either run the program from the command-line with: $ flatpak run io.github.jeffshee.Hidamari or from your desktop environment. In GNOME, it’s present by clicking the Show Apps button.

In Operation

Hidamari has a simple UI.

We can chose a local video as the default wallpaper, or more interestingly, we can stream a video from a URL. This functionality uses the superb yt-dlp program as the backend. yt-dlp is a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader. So you’re not limited to streaming video from say YouTube. Even though the program appears to let you choose a video at any location, we could only get videos to play that are stored in Hidamari’s folder.

We can set a video wallpaper to play on a specific display or all displays although this had no effect on our test system — the video wallpaper played on all displays regardless of the option chosen. You shouldn’t see a significant impact on your system’s performance as there’s GPU acceleration.

You can also set a web page as your wallpaper. This can be a URL or a local web page.

The program has some configuration options in the Quick toggles section.

Here’s the default settings. As you can see, the program doesn’t automatically autostart after login but this can be enabled.

There’s also a config.json file available if you prefer editing text files.

Summary

Add a touch of pizzazz to your wallpaper with Hidamari. And why not go the whole hog and add the LinuxLinks website to your background.

Hidamari is rather buggy. For example, one of our test systems, the video only displays a couple of frames before ceasing playback (both with X11 and Wayland), and didn’t work at all with streaming.

Hopefully with more development, issues like this will be ironed out.

Website: github.com/jeffshee/hidamari
Support:
Developer: Jeff Shee
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Hidamari is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Complete list of articles in this series: