Papyrus

What Papyrus is

Papyrus is a free, open-source animated wallpaper manager for Linux Wayland desktops, built primarily for COSMIC. It supports video files in MP4, WebM, MKV, AVI, and MOV formats, as well as JPEG, PNG, WebP, and BMP images. Users can set a different wallpaper and scaling option for each monitor, and playlists can rotate at a chosen interval in random or sequential order.

The app scans selected folders and builds a local wallpaper library with thumbnail previews. On COSMIC, it can derive an accent color from a wallpaper and switch between dark and light mode based on its brightness. Papyrus can start at login and check for, download, and install updates from within the app. It uses mpvpaper to display wallpapers behind the desktop and lists COSMIC, GNOME, Hyprland, Sway, and KDE Wayland as supported environments. Installation choices include a universal installer, Debian package, and AUR package. The universal installer lists Pop, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE; Flatpak builds are no longer supported or maintained. The project says there are no accounts, telemetry, or cloud service, and configuration is stored in a local JSON file. Papyrus uses the GPL-3.0 license.