What is swww?

Note: this project has since been renamed to "awww" and moved to Codeberg. The GitHub repository now points to the new location. The description below is based on the original swww readme. swww is a wallpaper tool for Wayland, the display system used by many modern Linux desktop environments. Its main job is to set background images on your desktop and to animate between them with smooth transitions when you switch from one image to another. Unlike some alternatives, it does this through a small background process called a daemon that keeps running and can be controlled with commands at any time, so you can change your wallpaper from a script without restarting anything. The tool supports a wide range of image formats including JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP, and SVG, and it can display animated GIFs on your desktop as a live wallpaper. When you switch images, it offers several transition styles: a simple fade, wipes from different directions, or effects that expand from the center or edges of the screen. You can control the speed and smoothness of those transitions. swww is designed specifically for compositors that support a protocol called wlr-layer-shell, which is common in setups built around the wlroots library. It will not work on GNOME, which uses a different approach for managing the desktop layer. The author built swww partly because an earlier tool called oguri had become unmaintained and had memory problems with animated GIFs, and partly because no existing Wayland wallpaper tool allowed changing the wallpaper live without restarting the daemon. The tool is intentionally kept minimal, and the maintainer has stated that new features will generally not be added. For anything beyond setting and transitioning wallpapers, the expectation is that users combine swww with shell scripts.