we_manager

A Wallpaper Engine manager for Linux. Browses the Steam Workshop through steamworks.js, keeps a local library of subscribed wallpapers with folders and tags, and plays animated wallpapers on the desktop via linux-wallpaperengine.

Steam must be running and Wallpaper Engine (app id 431960) must be in the library for workshop browsing and subscriptions to work. Without Steam the app still works as a local library manager.

Running

npm install
npm run dev      # dev mode with hot reload
npm run build    # compile to out/
npm run dist     # package with electron-builder

Notes

• Settings downloads a prebuilt linux-wallpaperengine from the linux-wallpaperengine-kde releases on Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 44 and Arch, into ~/.local/share/linux-wallpaperengine-kde (sudo only to install missing system libraries). Elsewhere it builds and installs from source (needs sudo for the package manager and make install), from a configurable repository (git URL or local path) and branch.
• The optional desktop icons overlay (src/main/services/desktop-icons-overlay.py) draws KDE Folder View icons on a transparent layer-shell surface above the wallpaper. It needs python3, GTK4, gtk4-layer-shell and pycairo, and only works on Wayland.
• steam_appid.txt is required by the Steamworks SDK and must stay next to the app.
• Known issue: disabling "Enable system tray" in Settings can leave the tray icon in the panel until the app is fully closed. Electron's Linux tray backend doesn't reliably release the icon's DBus/StatusNotifierItem registration while the process is still running, even though destroy() is called correctly on our end. Confirmed upstream: relaunching the process is the only thing that clears it, but doing that from the toggle itself caused GPU/window failures on Wayland, so it isn't worth the tradeoff.