Multi-monitor wallpapers with Hydrapaper

When using multiple monitors, by default, means that your desktop wallpaper is duplicated across all of your screens. However, with all that screen real-estate that a multiple monitor setup delivers, having a different wallpaper for each monitor is a nice way to brighten up your workspace even more.

One manual workaround for getting different wallpapers on multiple monitors is to manually create it using something like the GIMP, cropping and positioning your backgrounds by hand. There is, however, a neat wallpaper manager called Hydrapaper that makes setting multiple wallpapers a breeze.

Hydrapaper

Hydrapaper is a simple GNOME application that auto-detects your monitors, and allows you to choose different wallpapers for each display. In the background, it achieves this by simply composing a new background image from your choices that fits your displays, and sets that as your new wallpaper. All with a single click.

Hydrapaper lets the user define multiple source directories to choose wallpapers from, and also has an option to select random wallpapers from the source directories. Finally, it also allows you to specify your favourite images, and provides an additional category for favourites. This is especially useful for users that have a lot of wallpapers and change them frequently.

Installing Hydrapaper on Fedora Workstation

Hydrapaper is available to install from the 3rd party Flathub repositories. If you have never installed an application from Flathub before, set it up using the following guide:

Install Flathub apps on Fedora

After correctly setting up Flathub as a software source, you will be able to search for and install Hydrapaper via GNOME Software.

Fedora Project community

13 Comments

  1. Martin

    As a KDE user I can only smile about this. With Plasma one can easily set different wallpapers for each display for a very long time :-).

    • Adam

      I was smiling before I even clicked the link. Settings per display has been in KDE since I started using it.

  2. Qoyyuum

    I’ll stick with my Variety Wallpaper package. Its got some thought-provoking and sometimes funny quotes that randomises on the wallpaper from time to time.

  3. John B Spence

    Under settings, desktop in Xfce you can set different wallpapers for different monitors and have them rotate at different times if you want. Been doing this since I learned that using 2 monitors was better than one 🙂

  4. dreamer_

    I love Gnome, but this functionality SHOULD be in settings by default, without need for an additional app. Same goes for user-selected animated wallpapers (functionality is built-into Gnome, but there’s no UI for selecting xml file defining a wallpaper – WTF).

    • Martin

      This is why I left GNOME at some point. I do like their polished UI, but I feel that they are oversimplifying just a bit too much. This way they create a divide between casual users and expert users whereas KDE seems to have a smoother transition there.

    • dachampion

      I experienced that also and I will be removing hydrapaper on my Gnome desktop

  5. Nikato Muirhead

    KDE is the kitchen sink. I dont want every feature I could ever need presented to me all at once. I prefer simplicity with extra features as add-ons

    • Martin

      I find these discussions very interesting. To me they show that there really is a broad spectrum of users. Sometimes I feel a bit too arrogant thinking that I know what all or at least most users want, but then reading articles like this and their comments gets me down to earth.

      For me I like KDE, but then I really want features and options. But I am the type of person who also digs in configuration files. For me GNOME seems overly simplified and KDE just right, but for apparently KDE is too convoluted and GNOME is just right. I really wonder if it would be possible to unify these things in any way to serve both our desires.

  6. mirceacluj

    nu apare nimic din fluthub trebuie facut un upgrade?

  7. mirceacluj

    [root@localhost mir]# dnf install hydrapaper

    Last metadata expiration check: 0:42:10 ago on Du 04 aug 2019 23:50:10 +0300.
    No match for argument: hydrapaper
    Error: Unable to find a match

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