veil 1.0.0-beta.1

Added

• veil is source-available under the PolyForm Strict License 1.0.0 with additional permissions (ADDITIONAL-PERMISSIONS.md), free to use for noncommercial purposes; it is not open source. The release tarballs and the Nix package carry LICENSE, ADDITIONAL-PERMISSIONS.md and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES, the licences of the Rust crates veil links.
• veil daemon: a wallpaper on every output of a Wayland compositor with wlr-layer-shell (Hyprland, sway and other wlroots compositors), also on outputs connected later, or only on the outputs named with --output. An output that is unplugged gets its wallpaper back when it returns.
• Images in the formats of the image crate (PNG, JPEG, WebP, BMP, TIFF, GIF, ...), decoded once and composited at the output's resolution; pictures over 16384 pixels per side, or that would need more than 512 MiB, are refused before they are decoded.
• Video wallpapers through GStreamer (waylandsink), without audio, looped without rebuilding the pipeline, decoded in hardware when GStreamer has a decoder for the card. The log names the decoder.
• Images and videos are told apart by the content of the file. Animated GIFs play as videos. Files that cannot be a wallpaper (a directory, an empty file, HEIF, JPEG XL, something unknown) are refused with the reason.
• Scaling modes fill, fit, stretch, center and tile (--mode), and a background colour for the bars (--bg-color), for images and videos.
• HiDPI and fractional scales (wp_viewporter, wp_fractional_scale_v1): pictures are drawn at the output's physical resolution.
• A new wallpaper replaces the old one only once it has something to show (for a video, its first frame); one that fails leaves the old one on screen.
• A video that fails while it plays is restarted (four times in a row at most), then given up with one desktop notification. Notifications are throttled.
• Automatic pause of a video behind a fullscreen window, or, with --pause-on covered, behind windows that cover the whole output, read from the IPC of Hyprland or sway, per output.
• A video nobody is shown (a locked screen, a monitor that is off) is stopped after two seconds and started again when the output is drawn again, on any compositor (--release-unseen-after).
• Commands for a running daemon: veil set, clear, pause, resume and toggle, for every output or one (--output), status and outputs (both with --json), quit (alias stop) and ping, with stable exit statuses.
• A control socket in XDG_RUNTIME_DIR for other programs (status bars, scripts), one JSON object per line, versioned, and only for processes of the same user. Reference: docs/ipc.md.
• The wallpaper of each output is saved ($XDG_STATE_HOME/veil/state.json) and shown again after a restart; veil set --no-persist skips that.
• A configuration file, ~/.config/veil/config.toml: the daemon's options and each output's wallpaper, checked with veil config check. Reference: docs/configuration.md, example: contrib/config.example.toml.
• A systemd user unit (contrib/systemd/veil.service): active once every output shows its wallpaper, restarted after a crash with the wallpapers it had, a watchdog on the event loop.
• One daemon per compositor; a second one exits with status 4.
• Shell completions for bash, zsh, fish and nushell (veil completions) and a man page per command.
• A Nix flake: the package (wrapped with its GStreamer plugins and a GStreamer registry of its own), nix run, an overlay, and dev shells.
• Prebuilt binaries for x86_64 and aarch64 Linux with every release: a tarball with the binary, the systemd unit, the man pages, the shell completions, the documents and install.sh (into /usr/local, or --prefix ~/.local; --uninstall), with SHA256SUMS and a build-provenance attestation per tarball. They use the system's GStreamer and need glibc 2.34 or newer; run on Debian 12 and 13, Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, Fedora 44 and Arch Linux.
• Documentation: a README with a quick start, the features and their status, the measured numbers, and the installation from source on Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora; troubleshooting and a compatibility table, what was measured, known issues.

Deprecated

• veil --daemon ..., the command line of the first prototype. It still starts the daemon, with a warning; use veil daemon ....

Known issues

• A monitor that is changed, plugged in or powered on while a video plays crashes the daemon, inside GStreamer's waylandsink (known issue 1). Under the systemd unit it is back within seconds with its wallpapers.
• On NVIDIA every video frame is converted to RGB on the CPU: about 18 % of a core for 1080p at 30 fps (known issue 7).
• Without MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=1, which the Nix package and the systemd unit set, memory grows with every video switch (known issue 3).
• With the prebuilt binary on a GStreamer older than 1.26 (Debian 12, Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04), animated GIFs stand still or do not start, because of GStreamer's GIF demuxer (on Debian 12 it also keeps a CPU core busy); converted to a video they play. On Ubuntu 24.04, 1080p videos showed only part of their frames in a headless sway (known issue 8).
• Everything so far was checked in a headless sway on an NVIDIA card; the checks in a real Hyprland session, and on Intel and AMD cards, are still to be done.