ColorWall Linux

ColorWall Linux is a native Linux Wallpaper Engine built with Rust, Tauri, and libmpv.

It is currently heavily work-in-progress (WIP). The architecture relies on directly interacting with Wayland compositors to render hardware-accelerated video backgrounds underneath desktop icons using the wlr-layer-shell protocol.

Architecture & Tech Stack

• Frontend: React + TypeScript (Vite) wrapped in Tauri.
• Backend IPC/Engine: Rust (Tauri commands).
• Sidecar Video Player: A standalone Rust binary (cl-video-player) spawned by the Tauri backend.
• Wayland / EGL: Uses a custom fork of layershellev to manage the layer shell, exposing raw wl_display and wl_surface pointers.
• Rendering: Uses khronos-egl for FFI OpenGL context creation, which is fed directly into libmpv's render API for hardware video decoding.
• Event Loop: Merges Wayland compositor events (configure/resizes) and libmpv redraw ticks into a single calloop event loop to avoid multithreading collisions on the EGL context.

Current State

• ✅ Basic Tauri IPC bridge and Sidecar spawning.
• ✅ layershellev fork integrated and Wayland wlr-layer-shell background surfaces rendering on KWin (KDE Plasma).
• ✅ EGL OpenGL surface extracted from WlSurface (via wayland-egl).
• ✅ libmpv initialization and context binding.
• 🚧 IPC Socket Listener: Passing pause/play commands from the Tauri UI into the MPV render loop via Unix Domain Sockets (currently being implemented).
• 🚧 X11 / GNOME Fallback: mutter.rs stub is currently empty. The engine only runs on compositors supporting wlr-layer-shell right now.

Running

This project cannot be compiled or run on Windows. It contains deep native Linux C bindings and relies on Wayland protocols.

You must build and run it on a Linux machine or VM.

# Start the Tauri dev server
pnpm tauri dev