Wallpapi is an Omarchy-inspired wallpaper switcher for GNOME desktops that offers a slicker.
When installed, it lets you “browse a folder of wallpapers as a full-screen carousel of parallelogram cards”. As you page through available options, the focused image is previewed as your wallpaper in the background, so you can see it larger, which is pretty cool.
As soon as you see the drape you want, you just hit Enter to immediately set it as the desktop background.
Choices are also scheme-aware. If a light or dark variant is available, Wallpapi sets the correct version of an image per your system dark mode preference.
Caching is also used to keep image previews somewhat instantaneous. I found the extension slow to load the sheared cards when using a folder full of high-resolution images. That could be a bug, or it could be that my device is a bit too low-power.
Preferences-wise, Wallpapi keeps things trim. You can you set the folder it pulls backgrounds from and whether it should include subfolders within that.
In all, an interesting and more engaging way to change background.
There’s no animation between the focus card (which appears larger to denote focus) and adjacent ones, which feels a bit abrupt. The background previews do use a fade transition which draws the eye’s focus.
Looping images in a ‘never ending carousel’ rather than ‘hard stop’ at the first/last image could be a future option to add.
Brace for gnashing: this extension is inspired by the wallpaper picker in Omarchy1 which, for anyone not hooked up intravenously to Linux social media drama, is a popular Linux distribution attracting both a lot of funding and ire due to its founder’s political views.
Wallpapi is nothing to do with Omarchy and hasn’t been made by DHH. Even the style isn’t unique; visually, it reminds me of the Art Book Next theme for retro gaming systems like Batocera.
If you want to try it out, you can; it works with GNOME 50 (Ubuntu 26.04 LTS). You can install it from the same place you install all yer other ‘stensions, EGO:
Get Wallpapi on GNOME Extensions
- Long-time readers may recall Omakub, a script I covered many moons ago. You’d run it on a vanilla Ubuntu install to turn it into a dev-focused setup. The author of Omakub later retooled it for Arch and that became the basis of this distro. ↩︎