PAPERVIEW
Paperview is a high performance animated desktop background setter for Linux and X11.
Video of the above screenshot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZTiA885bWM
Build
make # NOTE: SDL2 is required
Use
./paperview FOLDER SPEED
A lower SPEED number will result in a faster frame rate. Only BMP files are supported. Creating your own BMP folders from gifs requires imagemagick. For example, creating a castle folder from castle.gif which you downloaded:
mkdir castle
mv castle.gif castle
cd castle
convert -coalesce castle.gif out.bmp
rm castle.gif
Performance
Running on a Thinkpad X230 from 2012 at 1920x1080 and 60fps with an integrated Intel GPU:
intel_gpu_time ./paperview castle 5
user: 1.904135s, sys: 0.357277s, elapsed: 100.458648s, CPU: 2.3%, GPU: 11.7%
Known Issues
Picom, Compton (and possibly other compositors) seem to already write to the base root X11 window which may overwrite the render done by paperview.
Alternatives
Alternatively, if SDL2 is a problem, or if you are on Windows, two workarounds are currently available:
Pure X11 (without SDL2)
https://gist.github.com/AlecsFerra/ef1cc008990319f3b676eb2d8aa89903