Wallpaper Engine for KDE

Live wallpapers from Wallpaper Engine, running natively in KDE Plasma 6. Scene, Web, and Video wallpapers all work, 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

Fedora / Bazzite / rpm-ostree — grab the RPM from Releases:

sudo dnf install ./wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin-qt6-*.rpm    # Fedora
rpm-ostree install ./wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin-qt6-*.rpm  # Bazzite / Silverblue

Ubuntu / Debian — grab the .deb from Releases. You'll need Ubuntu 25.04+ or Debian Trixie+ (anything older ships a Qt that's too old):

sudo apt install ./wallpaper-engine-kde-plugin_*.deb

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. Point Steam Library at the folder that holds your steamapps directory. Usually that's ~/.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:

find $HOME /run/media -maxdepth 6 -name steamapps -type d 2>/dev/null

Multi-monitor, per-screen settings, and playlists 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, or GStreamer 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, 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 and Known Issues cover the common ones — empty wallpaper lists, black desktops, missing audio.

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.