We’re building a custom animated wallpaper service for the Hyprland desktop environment on NixOS, using Rust and Vulkan for high-performance rendering.

The core idea is to create a daemon that displays real-time, shader-based animations—ported from platforms like Shadertoy—as the desktop background.

This involves integrating Wayland’s layer-shell protocol to position the render surface behind other windows, setting up a Vulkan graphics pipeline with wgpu for cross-compatible GPU acceleration, and handling uniforms like time and resolution to drive dynamic effects.

The result is a lightweight, customizable live wallpaper that leverages modern GPU capabilities allowing for bespoke shader implementations and potential extensions like mouse interactivity.