✦   for Pop!_OS COSMIC   ✦ Papyrus

Papyrus

Animated wallpapers that breathe life into your desktop — and color into your theme.

View on GitHub Quick Install ↓
Quick Install
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PSGtatitos/papyrus/main/install.sh | bash
What it does

Everything your desktop deserves.

🎬
Live Animated Wallpapers

Set any MP4, WebM, MKV, AVI or MOV file as a live looping wallpaper via mpvpaper. No Wallpaper Engine required.

🎨
Auto-Theme Your DE

Papyrus extracts the most vibrant color from your wallpaper and applies it as your COSMIC accent color — live, no restart.

🌙
Smart Dark/Light Mode

Detects average brightness from your wallpaper and switches COSMIC between dark and light mode automatically.

🖼️
Thumbnail Previews

Video thumbnails are auto-generated with ffmpeg so you can browse your collection visually before applying.

🔁
Start on Login

One toggle persists your wallpaper across reboots by writing an autostart desktop entry automatically.

🚫
Zero Telemetry

No accounts, no cloud, no analytics. Config is a plain JSON file at ~/.config/papyrus/config.json. That's it.

Under the hood

How Papyrus works.

I
You pick a wallpaper

Click any video thumbnail in the Papyrus grid. The app kills any running mpvpaper instance and starts a new one with loop enabled on your Wayland output.

II
Colors are extracted

Pillow samples every pixel in the thumbnail, scores each by vibrancy (saturation × brightness), and picks the most vivid color as your new accent.

III
COSMIC theme updates live

Papyrus writes the color directly to COSMIC's compiled theme config in RON format. COSMIC watches these files via inotify and applies changes instantly — no logout needed.

IV
Your desktop breathes

Panel, dock, windows, and accent colors all shift to match the mood of your wallpaper. Dark wallpaper → dark mode. Bright wallpaper → light mode.

Find your wallpaper

Where to look.

MoeWalls

Anime & gaming wallpapers, optimized WebM/MP4, free to download.

MotionBGs

8,000+ animated wallpapers in 4K. Huge variety of styles.

Wallsflow

Growing free collection. Cars, games, anime, nature, abstract.

Pexels Videos

Thousands of cinematic 4K clips. Free, no attribution required.

Ready to bring your desktop to life?

One command. No accounts. No nonsense.

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