Ditch the scripts and erase the elaborate terminal commands ‘cos the following GTK4 app makes it super easy to create dynamic wallpapers to use in GNOME 42 (and above).
Woah, woah: not the old kind of dynamic wallpapers. Awesome though those timed .xml slideshows were/are I’m well aware that applications to craft them are not new (though weirdly I don’t think I’ve ever written about any 💁🏻♂️).
Anyway, I’m here talking about a new Dynamic Wallpaper creator for GNOME 42 and above.
To recap: vanilla GNOME 42 comes with a proper standardised dark mode implementation that all modern GNOME apps respect. It’s pretty cool. As part of that whole thing new dynamic wallpapers were implemented. These change based on which theme mode is active.
Don’t confuse these with Ubuntu 22.04 and Pop!_OS 20.04’s separate-wallpaper-for-dark-mode capability; it’s along those lines but a lot more finessed.
GNOME 42 comes with a bunch of these “duo” wallpapers as standard. You can tell them apart from bog’o’standard backgrounds as they have a cute split thumbnail on show in in the Settings > Appearance gallery (and when set, you can also preview light/dark version in the style thumbnails):
Creating your own dynamic wallpapers to use in GNOME 42+ is now as simple as scouring the web for a pair of complimentary images, picking them in the app, giving your creation a name, and et voila: a custom dynamic wallpaper is ready use in the Appearance panel:
For an insincere lol (and cos it’s late and it was the first thing that came to my mind) I downloaded Windows 11’s light and dark wallpaper and passed them to the app:
And, after hitting ‘create, ta-dah: auto-change-y wallpaper goodness on my Fedora install:
A formal release of this app is expected on Flathub in due course. Update: it’s now available from Flathub. You can also grab a Flatpak build the Github project releases page. Keep in mind this version of the app won’t auto-update.
Dynamic Wallpaper requires GNOME 42 or later (meaning dynamic backgrounds you make in it won’t work on earlier versions of the DE nor in Ubuntu 22.04, which doesn’t ship with all of GNOME 42 intact). Also, this apps is in development so caveats about bugs apply.
In short, Dynamic Wallpaper app gives you an easy way to create wallpaper pairs that change with your light/dark mode preference. The app doesn’t do anything else (and I’m not entirely sure how to remove dynamic wallpapers that get added) but it’s well worth checking out if you’re an avowed fan of GNOME’s new light and dark style wallpaper combos.