Ubuntu 20.04 screen saver background?

Question

May I change the Ubuntu 20.04 screen saver background ? I do not see any option to do so.

Answer 1

One way to use a screensaver as a background is by changing the output of the screen saver program to display in the desktop window, but you need to know what the window id is of the desktop first. Run the following command in a terminal window and click on your desktop area:

xwininfo | grep "Window id:"

The window id will start with "0x" and include a long number after that. Copy this window id then is it as an argument to the -window-id option in most xscreensaver visuals like this:

/usr/lib/xscreensaver/skyrocket -window-id 0x2400007

Replace 0x2400007 with whatever window id is shown in your output.

You should probably first see what visuals are available by running

ls /usr/lib/xscreensaver

Usually the screensaver visuals are in that directory. If not, you should first of all find out if you have xscreensaver installed and where the visuals are located. You can just run those commands to see what is available and by default they will run the screensaver in a separate window.

Some other programs like command line video players can have their output changed to a specific window id. For instance, the mpv video player can do this using the --wid option

mpv -wid 0x2400007 ~/Videos/aquarium.mp4

Some other programs have options like this to redirect the output of the program to another window.

Once you stop any of these programs though your desktop environment will overwrite the desktop background with whatever it was set to before.