What is Reddit's opinion of Variety Wallpaper Changer?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Haha, I'm very glad to see you are using a program I've created - Variety, and are enjoying a photo I've taken (https://www.flickr.com/photos/peter-levi/7527957910/in/dateposted-public/) :) Cheers!

Developer of Variety here. Please make sure there is an easy way to change the wallpaper from the terminal or from inside a program. KDE4 is abysmal in this aspect. Thank you.

You want Variety. Peter Levi has even presented it here in /r/Ubuntu. See the article.

<strong>Variety</strong> - GPL GUI open source wallpaper manager for all desktop environments. Works as intended. I am currently cycling NASA APOD wallpapers every 2 hours. It's educational and can be very beautiful.

Accepts bitcoin : http://peterlevi.com/variety/donate/

Nice work OP.

There's also Variety, a neat utility which can pull from any source (NASA APOD is enabled by default) and rotate your wallpaper on a regular schedule. Very flexible and easy to use, and supports both CLI and GUI operation. I highly recommend.

Distro: Ubuntu

DE: Unity

Theme: Numix (modified close, minimize, maximize buttons from Mbuntu)

Terminal: gnome-terminal (font: Ubuntu Mono Regular 11px)

Random Wallpaper from Variety

Icons: Numix Circle

Well there are several wallpaper changers that can change the image time based (even Windows 7 can do that ootb). But the problem is that you don't start your computer at the same time, so it gets out of sync. E.g. Variety

If you want it synced to a clock or even sunset or sunrise that can't be easily done with those graphical wallpaper changers. But those need many resources any way.

The good way:

Get a (Full)HD video of the episode, cut the video so you only have the part that is shown in the gif. Extract frames:

ffmpeg -i inputfile.mp4 %d.jpg

Write a script that looks at the time and calculates the right image/frame. Let the script set the background.

For Gnome and Unity:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri file:///path/to/right/frame/image.png

For Windows:

reg add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop" /v Wallpaper /t REG_SZ /d E:\photos\image1.bmp /f RUNDLL32.EXE user32.dll,UpdatePerUserSystemParameters

Then add the script to autostart.

Or one could do all the work to get it integrated in one of the live wallpaper changers that set your wallpaper to weather, sunset or else, but that is a bit too much work imho.

I think there are people that get pissed off when they say "you can write an extension to do that" when there's a feature request. Or (gasp) they take away a core feature.

I've never had a big problem with it but then again I'm not a look and feel tweaker. About all I do is install the variety wallpaper changer and run my decade old gsettings script that maps a few keyboard shortcuts and I'm good to go.

Exactly. Here is the conky. Used this wallpaper with the Variety app. Compositing on firefox was disabled in an attempt to solve some lag with smoothscrool. Forgot to turn it back on before taking the screenshot.

Don't know if there's an extension to autohide the top bar, but this one can make it transparent at least.

Variety can be used to set your wallpaper to images from subreddits (as well as other sites).

If you want a nice automatic background changer you should check out Variety. It's in the repository as well. >sudo apt install variety

It has a lot of preset sources and you can add your own.

I think my only peeve is that he still hasn't updated it so that it shows in the icon tray without using something like TopIcons Plus. But you can set a shortcut so that it does a "variety --next" if you want to flip to the next background.

> This is for Pkasma4 [sic]

Many of the bugs on that tracker are assigned to old, outdated versions of the products. But the bugs persist. Sometimes someone will update the bug's assignment to a more current version of the product, sometimes they won't.

> and it's even not related to wallpaper configuration

Well, it is. See here.

I don't even choose; I use Variety to cycle a random one every three days, which will probably be showing me a different wallpaper for about ten years at this point. Even wrote a custom filter to handle non-aspect images without cutting off or getting black borders.

> I want more control over the desktop background slideshow so I can choose exactly which pictures and from all the different folders that cycle.

Can't speak for the default slideshow, but I just install Variety. Best wallpaper manager/switcher I've ever used, and quite powerful. you can even write your own imagemagick filters (example one I figured out myself) into the preferences.

Mint is apt-based, so here's a good one with a PPA:

http://peterlevi.com/variety/

Way, way more features than you need now, but it'll rotate through a folder no problem.

If that doesn't work out, I imagine most people just use a shell script and Cron to do the same thing. This thread has the gsettings command to change the wallpaper: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=294296

A "." in front of the file-name indicates a hidden file so it can't be seen as a background. This unfortunately also means the picture will be invisible in your file manager.

I currently use variety. Works really well for me:

Variety

This is the current desktop on my laptop.

I am running Gnome 3.12 on Arch Linux. My wallpaper changes every 30 minutes and I am using a cool tool called Variety to automatically fetch wallpapers from pre-defined sources. So I never know what's coming next.

I downloaded/onstalled variety, "Variety An automatic wallpaper changer, downloader and manager. http://peterlevi.com/variety Copyright (c) 2012-2019, Peter Levi, James Lu & Variety contributors This program comes with absolutely no warranty. See the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later for details." so I don't know which wallpaper your talking about.

Thanks for sharing. I use an automatic wallpaper changer on my laptop (http://peterlevi.com/variety), which allows you to choose the sources of photos. I've enjoyed pointing it at r/EarthPorn and often will stumble upon an image I want to know more about. In this case, even better with the link to your album.

I posted the script somewhere in the comments. It's GNOME only, but you could download the wallpapers and make the script yourself.

EDIT: Maybe you could try something like this or this.

To save anyone else time searching for the app. in question, I believe this is it: http://peterlevi.com/variety/how-to-install/

I haven't tried it and cannot vouch for it, so try at your own risk.

Install Variety. It will periodically fetch new wallpapers from various places and cycle through them every few minutes. If you happen to find one you would really like to keep you can save it from Variety's tray icon. Saved pictures will reappear in the slideshow frequently.

Fyi, If you run Linux this is a great app, and can pull from Reddit.

http://peterlevi.com/variety/

Its easy to setup and highly scriptable and I have it passing through imagemagic and setting different wallpapers for different monitors.

Yeah. My-Weather-Indicator, Variety wallpaper switcher, and System Load Indicator all are broken with no icon present in Loki :(

I'm not sure about the background for each workspace but I use variety to swap backgrounds on boot and every 30 minutes. Lots of options and image sources.

I'm using it with Gnome 3.16 on Ubuntu 15.04.

http://imgur.com/8B8jiDE *Freeze Window Decoration *OxyGlass Desktop theme *KDE launcher Panel with KDE Kicker as application launcher *Variety wallpaper changer *CWP weather plasmoid

You should look into integrating with Variety on Linux, and its companion site VRTY.org. Very robust favoriteing system and tight desktop integration.

I like the moka icons, although I didn't know about ravefinity until now and am impressed by it.

Another flagrant piece of eyecandy is variety, an excellent wallpaper changer. It has just had a big upgrade, including automatic grabbing of Reddit images (e.g. /r/earthporn).

You can do it using Imgur to some degree. The problem with Reddit is that it is a media aggregator; nothing is coming from the same place, necessarily. Imgur is just the most common. Variety's creator has some comments about it on his blog.

On our Lubuntu htpc, I installed the "variety" wallpaper changer that sucks down photos from NASA and whatnot. There's an Ubuntu PPA, or if you run Arch there's a build in the AUR. It looks like there are also some builds in the openSuse build service.

http://peterlevi.com/variety/

ok well unity tweak is good but i find i can do more in ubuntu tweak. just download and install. it can do a few things but i mainly look at the theme options. from there you will be able to change the themes to the ones you have installed http://numixproject.org/ - all i do is follow the steps to install the free icon pack and theme. then use ubuntu tweak to set the themes and bam done.

i also use http://peterlevi.com/variety/ as my background manager. awesome little app.