Want to get refresh of your desktop background with new wallpapers every day? Here’s a new app to do the job for Linux with GNOME Desktop!

It’s Picture of The Day, a GTK4 application written in Rust programming language. With it, you may get wallpaper images from the following sources:

• NASA Astronomy Picture Of The Day
• Bing
• Simon Stålenhag Artwork
• Wikimedia Picture Of The Day

As you see with the screenshot above, the app offers a stupid simple user interface. Just choose image source from header bar, then it automatically fetches images for you then offers preview, as well as title, description, and link to image in side-bar.

Then, user may either click on the calendar icon in top-left to set daily wallpaper automatically, or click the image icon in top-right to set current image as wallpaper.

There are as well toggle button to show/hide the side-bar, and preferences to toggle NASA Astronomy collections.

The Picture of The Day app is so far only few months old. It keeps moving with new features. Planned features include:

• Option to save current image.
• Drag and drop current image to save or edit.
• Open image with default application (aka image viewer).
• Add new image sources.

At the moment, user may access the images by navigating to .var/app/de.swsnr.pictureoftheday, then check the “data” sub-folder.

Note all images are protected by copyright. You may NOT be allowed to use or distribute them. Do take a look at the license terms for each image.

And besides GNOME (both Wayland and Xorg), the default desktop for Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, and optional in Debian, Arch, etc, I’ve also tested the application in some other desktops:

• Cinnamon (Linux Mint 22.1): it does NOT launch in X, but working good in Wayland.
• XFCE (XUbuntu 24.04): fetch images but fail to set as wallpaper.
• Plasma 5 (KUbuntu 24.04): fetch images but fail to set as wallpaper.
• MATE (Debian 12): does NOT launch.

How to Install the Picture of the Day App

The new app is available to install in most Linux on amd64 (Intel/AMD) and arm64 (e.g., Raspberry Pi) through Flatpak package, which runs in sandbox environment.

Fedora Workstation (with 3rd party repository enabled) can search & install it directly from GNOME Software.

While Ubuntu and other Linux may run the steps below one by one to install:

• First, press Ctrl+Alt+T to open up a terminal window. Then, run command to install Flatpak daemon:

  sudo apt install flatpak

  Other Linux needs to follow this setup guide to enable Flatpak support.
  

• Finally, run the command below to install the package:

  flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/de.swsnr.pictureoftheday.flatpakref

  

After installed the app, either search for and launch from GNOME Overview (log out and back in if app icon is not visible):

Or use the command below to start from terminal (the --env flag is useful for debugging purpose):

flatpak run --env=G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all de.swsnr.pictureoftheday

And, you may check app updates by using command:

flatpak update de.swsnr.pictureoftheday

Uninstall Picture of The Day

To uninstall the app package, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data de.swsnr.pictureoftheday

Here skip --delete-data if you want to keep the app date including the downloaded images.

Also run flatpak uninstall --unused to uninstall useless runtime libraries.