Wallpaper Engine for KDE

Live wallpapers from Wallpaper Engine, running natively in KDE Plasma 6. Scene, Web, and Video wallpapers all work, with Scene wallpapers drawn by a custom Vulkan renderer — no emulation, no Windows code involved.

This is the actively maintained continuation of the original catsout plugin, rebuilt for Plasma 6 and Qt 6 with the old Python dependency gone for good.

Full documentation lives in the Wiki. This README is just enough to get you running.

Install

Arch (AUR) — the easy path:

yay -S wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin-new-fork
systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell.service

The AUR package is maintained separately from this repo, so its dependency list can fall behind. If the build stops on a missing package, install the list from Arch — build from source first. Already have wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin-git? Remove it — that's the older fork, and the two conflict.

Fedora / Bazzite / rpm-ostree — install from the project's COPR, which builds every change on main:

On standard Fedora:

sudo dnf copr enable captsilver666/wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin
sudo dnf install wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin-qt6
systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell.service

On Bazzite or Kinoite:

sudo dnf5 copr enable captsilver666/wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin
sudo rpm-ostree install wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin-qt6
systemctl reboot

Install it by package name, not a downloaded .rpm — rpm-ostree install ./some.rpm pins that exact file and never picks up a newer build. openSUSE Tumbleweed and Mageia 10 builds from the same COPR, and a curl fallback for images without dnf5, are in Installation.

Ubuntu / Debian — each release carries two .debs, one built on the current Ubuntu LTS and one on Debian stable, named for the distro (_ubuntu-26.04_, _debian-13_). Grab the one matching your system from Releases. Only those two are built: anything older ships a Qt that's too old, and interim Ubuntu releases aren't covered:

sudo apt install ./wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin_*.deb
systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell.service

Building from source? That's all in the wiki: Installation.

Set it up

1. Install Wallpaper Engine on Steam and subscribe to a few wallpapers from the Workshop.
2. Right-click the desktop → Configure Desktop and Wallpaper.
3. Set Wallpaper Type to Wallpaper Engine for KDE.
4. Open the Wallpapers tab and click Library. Point it at the folder that holds your steamapps directory — usually ~/.local/share/Steam, including on Bazzite, which ships Steam natively rather than as a Flatpak. If you did install Steam as a Flatpak, point at ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.local/share/Steam instead.
5. Pick a wallpaper and hit Apply.

Not sure which folder to point at? This lists every Steam library on disk, including the Flatpak one:

find $HOME /run/media -maxdepth 8 -name steamapps -type d 2>/dev/null

Per-screen wallpapers and subscribing from the Workshop are covered in Usage.

What works

Type	Rendered by	Needs
Scene (2D/3D)	custom Vulkan renderer	Wallpaper Engine assets
Web (HTML/JS)	QtWebEngine	Wallpaper Engine assets
Video	MPV by default, QtMultimedia as fallback	a video file

The Scene renderer handles most of what Wallpaper Engine throws at it: particles, post-processing, SceneScript, audio reactivity, and text layers. The full feature breakdown is in Scene Renderer.

Requirements

To run it: KDE Plasma 6, Qt 6.8+, and a working Vulkan 1.1+ driver (AMD users want RADV). Building from source also needs a C++20 compiler — Clang is what we build with.

Something not working?

Troubleshooting covers the common ones — empty wallpaper lists, black desktops, missing audio. Known Issues lists the standing quirks.

If the settings dialog itself looks wrong after an update — a tab that won't populate, a missing control — it's usually the KDE System Settings process (systemsettings) running an old compiled copy of the dialog's QML. It keeps its own disk cache separate from plasmashell's, at ~/.cache/systemsettings/qmlcache/; clear that directory and reopen the dialog to force a fresh compile.

Contributing

PRs are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md has the local build-and-test gate and a few house rules.

Credits

Standing on the shoulders of catsout's original plugin (no longer maintained) and the intermediate RainyPixel fork. Asset-format reference from RePKG. Licensed GPL-2.0.

Wallpaper Engine itself is a separate, proprietary app — this project isn't affiliated with or endorsed by its developers.