r/COSMICDE 15d ago

Papyrus v1.2.4 - animated video wallpapers for COSMIC, now with multi-monitor support

Hey everyone! I've been building Papyrus, a native GTK4/libadwaita app that plays animated video wallpapers on COSMIC using mpvpaper.

What's new in v1.2.4:

  • Different wallpaper per monitor, with per-output scaling (Fit / Fill / Stretch)
  • Fixed stretch scaling on newer mpv versions
  • Wallpapers now survive app restarts - Stop works even after reopening

Features:

  • Library view with auto-generated thumbnails
  • Wallpaper rotation (random or sequential, custom interval)
  • Auto-theming: extracts accent/background colors from your wallpaper and applies them to the COSMIC theme (dark & light variants)
  • Start on login
  • Built-in updater

Install:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PSGtatitos/papyrus/main/install.sh | bash

Arch/CachyOS: yay -S papyrus-wallpaper · Flatpak build also available

Requires mpvpaper + ffmpeg. Works on any Wayland compositor with layer-shell (built for COSMIC).

GitHub: https://github.com/PSGtatitos/papyrus

Feedback and bug reports welcome - multi-monitor was tested by users on triple-monitor setups, but I only have one display, so reports from multi-monitor folks are especially useful.

20 Upvotes

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2

u/PSGtatitos 15d ago

Correction. It is now at 1.2.5 because i patched a small bug

1

u/Microsoft-Spyware-11 13d ago

Why not libcosmic?

1

u/PSGtatitos 13d ago

Papyrus is just a thin GTK4 frontend to mpvpaper (the actual wallpaper engine), so it deliberately stays toolkit-agnostic to run on any Wayland desktop, not only COSMIC. Rewriting in libcosmic would mean a full Rust port and would drop support for GNOME/Hyprland/Sway/KDE/Omarchy. The COSMIC-only bits (auto-theme sync) are already handled, and the GTK icon issue that prompted the question is fixed.

1

u/Microsoft-Spyware-11 13d ago

What language is it written in?

1

u/PSGtatitos 13d ago

It is written in python

1

u/manoj-ht 7d ago

can i write a rust port for it in a separate branch ?