Variety is packed with great features, yet slim and easy to use. It can use local images or automatically download wallpapers from Unsplash and other online sources, allows you to rotate them on a regular interval, and provides easy ways to separate the great images from the junk. Variety can also display wise and funny quotations or a nice digital clock on the desktop.
Variety has an optional slideshow/screensaver companion application, Variety Slideshow. It can be installed separately, but it integrates nicely with Variety.
Installation
On a recent Ubuntu or Debian-based system (Universe repository has to be enabled on Ubuntu):
sudo apt update && sudo apt install variety
Detailed installation instructions are here. Variety runs on most distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, and their derivatives.
Variety is available in the distro repositories of:
For Ubuntu, a PPA is also available that provides newer releases than the ones available in the Universe repository:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:peterlevi/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install variety
If you have added the PPA, you may also install Variety Slideshow – a pan and zoom image slideshow/screensaver, which is an nice optional addition and integrates well into Variety:
sudo apt install variety-slideshow
Regardless of how you install, you can launch Variety from the dash or applications menu, or by running variety in a terminal.
Source code and bug-reporting
You can find the source code or report bugs at Variety’s project page in GitHub.
Variety Slideshow is also on GitHub.
Credits
Variety is developed by Peter Levi, a software developer from Bulgaria. Translations are provided by different contributing enthusiasts, you may join this effort here.
February 25, 2020 at 18:32
Dear Peter,
Firstly my thanks and appreciation for a very good wallpaper changer which I use on Linux Mint and enjoy.
Now for the question: I have many photos on my Google Photos. Is it possible to add Google Photos to the list of websites to download photos randomly from?
Any help shall be appreciated.
With thanks in advance,
March 6, 2020 at 14:35
I would like this feature very much too! 🙂
February 19, 2020 at 19:47
Hi, maybe a strange question but if i run variety from .xinitrc it starts but does not display any wallpaper.
If i start it from bspwm by lightdm then it works normal.
What am i missing when wanting to start variety by Xorg??
February 1, 2020 at 17:20
Nice program. Just started running Linux Mint. I wonder if there is an option to show the filename of the image on the desktop. Can’t seem to locate it. Running your version 0.6.7 Thank you.
December 27, 2019 at 23:57
Thanks for the reply, Peter. I’m obviously missing something here. When I click on “Add…” I get options for Images, Folders, Sequential Albums (order by filename), Sequential Albums (order by date), and then under a horizontal line Flickr. That’s all. Where is the Reddit plugin?
I’ve also noticed that the Downloaded directory in ~/.config/variety fills up rapidly – more than 2 GiB in less than 24 hours. Can I limit the the Downloaded folder to something like 1 GiB?
Can confirm what a previous poster said: Scrolling on the Variety icon does not change the wallpaper. At least on my KDE Neon setup it doesn’t.
December 28, 2019 at 21:28
You are right. I just tested this. I’ve introduced a bug that only showed when running from an installed version, not in dev. Reported here: https://github.com/varietywalls/variety/issues/259
I’ll fix and publish a bugfix ASAP.
The download quota is supposed to still work, but is now only configurable by editing the config file directly, not via GUI. The default on a new installation is 1GB. If this is not adhered to, this may be another bug. These subsystems have been rewritten pretty extensively, so I may have very well introduced some bugs.
Scrolling has been problematic on many DEs for quite some time. Did this use to work for you with the previous version, but not now?
December 28, 2019 at 22:16
Good to know it’s a bug. I thought this would end up being one of those embarrassing situations in which I am looking for something that ends up being right under my nose the entire time. 🙂
Yeah, the download quota does work. I checked the Downloaded folder a couple of hours ago, and it was at 2.2 GiB. I let it be and checked again now — 920 MiB. I was just being impatient before. I manually deleted stuff when it got over 2 GiB.
I never used scrolling before, so I don’t know if it used to work or not! This isn’t a big deal to me. I just wanted to confirm what another poster had written.
This release is a lot more stable. No crashes and I used to get them several times a day. Your work on this is much appreciated, Peter.
December 29, 2019 at 00:40
I’ve pushed a bugfix release to the PPAs. If you’ve installed from PPA, please update, try again and report back, thanks.
December 29, 2019 at 02:18
Looking at Sources in Discover package manager I don’t see a variety PPA. What I have is a line reading, “Bionic (main) – variety-ubuntu-stable-bionic”, and there’s a checkmark to the left-hand side of the line. Beneath it is an unchecked line which reads, “Bionic (main) Sources – variety-ubuntu-stable-bionic”. I’ve got no problem installing the PPA. Before I do, should I uncheck that one line?
December 29, 2019 at 02:26
I got the update right after I posted. Reddit is there! Thank you!
December 27, 2019 at 05:04
“Image sources are now plugins,” according to the Recent Changes notes. Are there any plugins currently available? If not, any news on these? I miss Reddit photos.
December 27, 2019 at 09:53
All of the previously existing sources are still available by default (plus a couple new ones, incl. searchable Unsplash), just internally implemented as plugins. Also adding new image sources is now way easier than before as one needs to implement just one Python class.
By “I miss Rddit photos” what do you mean? Reddit is still available as a Reddit source, just like before.
December 26, 2019 at 04:39
After the recent update of Linux Mint to 19.3 (Cinnamon), the ability to use the mouse wheel to scroll through wallpaper images has stopped working. There were several changes to the panel / system tray with this release (panel appearance divided into 3 zones now, new system tray solution called XAppStatusIcon, etc). Any ideas of what might serve as a workaround?
November 27, 2019 at 22:41
I have more than 1000 images that I download for design work, but the “image selector” only shows me a smaller amount than I have. Can you increase that amount to be able to choose anyone you find on my disk?
November 27, 2019 at 22:57
I have about 12,000 images I use for wallpaper. All in one folder and all jpg. No issues with it. I added the folder and selected it.
Are some of them not landscape? You might have “Landscape only” checked.
November 28, 2019 at 06:08
Check what you tell me, but the landscape mode is not checked. I’m in a Raspberry pi 3 with Raspbian maybe you lack memory to show more.
November 28, 2019 at 10:35
Image selector is limited, because if we want to show more images, we’ll have to implement dynamic loading and unloading of images from it as you scroll, due to memory constraints, which will make it too complex for its purpose. It’s purpose is to give you a random selection of images to pick a new wallpaper, not to be a full-blown image viewer that lists everything.
November 30, 2019 at 23:44
I found that Shotwell shows all the images in the directory and has a command to set an image as a background, which worked in the previous version of Rasbian but in this version stopped working, since when executing it nothing happens.
November 16, 2019 at 18:32
Variety produces images with Ubuntu 19.04, but they are not scaled. All I see with large images are rectangles cut from the center. There is no control I could find in Ubuntu which would fix this.
November 20, 2019 at 08:56
Pl install Tweaks application in Ubuntu and then go to appearance > Background image >select scaled.
It should be working as you desired…
November 23, 2019 at 17:25
Updated to 19.10 but there is still no scaling.
November 23, 2019 at 19:51
No longer a problem. I found the gnome-tweaks-tool.
October 20, 2019 at 22:14
Hello, thanks for this wonderful app.
Is there a transition animation in picture switching? or can be added?
October 5, 2019 at 20:08
I have retired from windows to ubuntu, I found Variety and I love it. Is there a way to download images from a web page different from the default ones?
Congratulations and thank you very much Peter
October 12, 2019 at 00:24
Hi Peter,
Would just like to also ask if different from the defaults, how can we download from a open shared gdrive folder?
October 2, 2019 at 15:51
Background: I’ve been happy/satisfied using variety on Ubuntu18.04
Q: I recently switched over to Pop!_OS 19.04 and I was wondering if anyone has reported feedback, on if variety works on pos!_os.
Thanks,
W
October 2, 2019 at 16:56
Yes it does. I’m running it in Boxes right now.
POP!_OS is an Ubuntu variant
September 25, 2019 at 16:03
When i got this error: OSError: cannot identify image file ‘/usr/share/backgrounds/greybird.svg’
I couldn’t get past the welcome screen. Had to rm the image to be able to press the continue button.
August 26, 2019 at 08:34
Thanks for this amazzing app Peter? Do you plan to port it for iOs and Android? Or do you happen to know such alternatives as yours on desktop
August 6, 2019 at 08:40
Love the app so far. I wonder if there is any way to set a different wallpaper on each of my screens rather than having them all show the same image?
August 6, 2019 at 17:14
Install “Nitrogen” for setting different wallpapers on each monitors
August 1, 2019 at 02:08
I have very recently installed variety-slideshow from the PPA, and I like it a lot (and yes, I have donated). I am running it from a command in the “Startup Applications Preferences” menu, the command being:
variety-slideshow –fade=0 –zoom=0 –pan=0 –sort=name –mode=desktop –seconds=600 /home/eric/DATA/Images/wallpaper
That gives me the desired rotating wallpapers, but it puts a tab in my bottom panel (this is Ubuntu MATE) just like any started app, such as Firefox or Thunderbird. Is there any easy way to run the slideshow as an invisible daemon, so there’s no tab in the apps panel? (If I ever needed to stop the slideshow in such a case, I could just end the process in the System Monitor.) I tried appending a space-ampersand to the startup command, but that seems to make no difference.
Thanks for the great app.
August 1, 2019 at 21:50
I just committed a new commandline flag for variety-slideshow that would allow you to hide the window from the taskbar. It should land in the repo fairly soon. Run –help once you update to see it, look for –hide-from-taskbar.
July 13, 2019 at 23:48
I was using Variety 0.6.0 on Peppermint Linux 8 and my pictures were shown in their original size. Now, using Variety 0.6.7 on Peppermint Linux 10, all my pictures are resized in some way (stretched, scaled, etc.) I would like my pictures shown without resizing, but I don’t see an option for that.
July 13, 2019 at 22:26
Great piece of software. my desktop never been cooler.
July 13, 2019 at 19:50
your install command for Ubuntu is: sudo apt-get install variety variety-slideshow I get a message saying that it can’t file a file called variety-slideshow, so I just installed variety. Any problem with that? What is variety-slideshow?
July 13, 2019 at 22:53
It’s installable just from the PPA, not from the Universe repository. I updated the instructions above to answer your question, please check them again.
July 11, 2019 at 02:28
on ubuntu 19.04 i get an error when starting variety in terminal: Segmentation fault (core dumped),
Variety does not start. Any solution?
July 17, 2019 at 10:06
I have same issue but on 18.04, I think this is due kernel version, with older version it worked.
July 1, 2019 at 20:24
There are any way to set different wallpaper on each monitor when using multiple monitors?
June 30, 2019 at 18:49
even small tumbler quotes getting truncated,any way to overcome this
June 16, 2019 at 13:59
It seems to repeat the sequence. Is there a way to make it start a different sequence each time?
May 24, 2019 at 14:20
Hello I have been using variety for some time now (my computer runs with Solus OS) but I have a small problem with the act of deleting a wallpaper from the terminal : it does not delete the metadata corresponding to them, forcing me to often make a big cleaning of the download files.