Wallpaper wizardry

So it seems I am ancient because I didn't realize until recently that live wallpapers were a thing. I don't mean the stupid animated ones that you install on your phone when you feel your battery lasts too long, but computer wallpapers that change during the day, usually going through a set of pictures of the same place at different times of day.

The Apple master race has apparently had this for the last few iterations of their OS, I'm not sure about Windows (I think W10 has something, I'm too lazy to look), but since completely moving from my amish horse cart that was Windows 8.1 to Linux Mint recently, I've been looking for ways to make my new computer digs spicy. Of course one of the first thigs I turned my eyes to was the wallpaper.

I tend to prefer darker, simpler wallpapers, and if they depict nature, all the better. So when I saw the one below, my interest was piqued.

I mean, just look at it.

I very quickly discovered that it's one of a set of sixteen matching wallpaprs made for MacOS Mojave to show off this fancyness that theyd'd just introduced. I usually prefer darker backgrounds, but they day ones are just as gorgeous in their simplicity.

Getting the actuall wallpapers wasn't a big deal, because as per fucking usual, it was Reddit to the rescue since some kind soul posted the whole set.

All that was left was to find something to swap them out at the right time. I tried out a few Linux utilities, but the one that got me closest is flowy. You can set it up as a service to run in the background, and if you give it your rough geo location it will time the switches based on sunrise and sunset where you are. Pretty sweet!

The program is not perfect, as it crashes ocassionaly, and has some weird bug where it screwes up what to show at one particular time. It's weird, but it mostly works. Which I've discovered with Linux is the best you're gonna get a lot of the time.