Turn your COSMIC desktop into a living canvas.
Aura brings fluid animated backgrounds, real-time theme color matching, and multi-monitor harmony to Linux. Engineered natively in Rust with zero game lag and zero telemetry.
Choose the view that suits your flow.
Live Showcase, Dynamic Auto-Theming, Quick Switcher HUD, Built-in Catalogs, and Multi-Screen Topology. One lightweight app.
Engineered to respect your hardware.
Running animated wallpapers on Linux should never mean hearing fan noise or dropping frames in your games.
Game-Sense Auto-Pause
Aura detects fullscreen games and heavy 3D workloads the exact millisecond they launch. Rendering pauses immediately, returning 100% of your GPU and CPU to your framerates.
Smart Battery Saver
Working away from your desk? Aura senses when your laptop runs on battery power and halts playback, keeping your fans silent and your battery lasting all day.
Dynamic Theme Color Sync
Bring your whole setup into harmony. Aura samples the colors of your wallpaper in real time, adapting your COSMIC dock, window borders, and active highlights automatically.
Quick Switcher Heads-Up Display
Bind aura switcher to your own custom keyboard shortcut in COSMIC Desktop settings. Cycle through your library with arrow keys and switch wallpapers instantly without leaving your active workspace.
Where it stands.
Every cell checked against the source. How Aura compares to alternatives on Linux.
| FEATURE / CAPABILITY | AURA (NATIVE RUST) | WALLPAPER ENGINE (STEAM / PROTON) | LEGACY LINUX SCRIPTS (PYTHON / GTK) |
|---|---|---|---|
| COSMIC Desktop Native | Yes (libcosmic native) | No (Wine / Proton wrapper) | No (Unintegrated scripts) |
| GPU Load in Fullscreen Games | 0.0% (Auto-Paused) | Inconsistent on Wayland | 3.0% – 8.0% continuous draw |
| Smart Battery Saver | Automatic on battery | Manual configuration | Requires custom scripting |
| Startup Speed | < 20 ms | ~3,000 ms (Steam runtime) | ~1,100 ms (interpreter overhead) |
| Dynamic Theme Matching | Real-time COSMIC sync | None (Windows only) | Requires pywal / external hooks |
| Built-in Online Wallpapers | 9,400+ (MotionBGS & Bing) | Steam Workshop only | None (Manual file search) |
| Wayland Protocol Architecture | Native Layer-Shell | X11 / XWayland bridge | X11 root window hacks |
| License & Accounts | 100% Free (GPL-3.0) | Paid ($3.99) + Steam account | Varies (GPL / MIT) |
Questions, answered.
What is Aura?
Aura is an open source live wallpaper manager built in compiled Rust specifically for COSMIC Desktop and modern Wayland compositors on Linux. It renders fluid 60 FPS animated loops and high-res static backgrounds with zero idle CPU wakeups and instant game pause.
Does it really use 0% GPU when playing games?
Yes. The instant a game or application enters fullscreen, Aura halts video decoding via MPV IPC. The GPU draw drops to 0.0%, returning 100% of your graphics card bandwidth and VRAM to your gameplay.
Which Linux distributions are supported?
Aura is designed for Pop!_OS and any distribution running COSMIC Desktop or Wayland layer-shell compositors, including CachyOS, Arch Linux, Fedora, openSUSE, and Debian.
How does dynamic auto-theming integrate with COSMIC?
Aura analyzes color vibrancy in your active wallpaper in real time. It calculates WCAG-compliant contrast tones and syncs accent colors directly with COSMIC Desktop's theming system, tinting your dock, active window borders, and UI highlights without manual configuration.
Where do the 9,400+ wallpapers come from?
Aura integrates curated online galleries directly into the interface: MotionBGS for handpicked looping live wallpapers (1080p and 4K), Wallhaven for high-resolution photography and digital art, and Microsoft Bing Daily for fresh UHD landscape imagery.
Is Aura free and open source? Any telemetry?
Aura is 100% free and open-source under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0). There is zero telemetry, zero analytics tracking, no accounts to create, and no ads.
How do I summon the Quick Switcher HUD?
Aura doesn't enforce a preconfigured shortcut so it never conflicts with your workflow. In COSMIC Desktop, go to Settings → Keyboard → Custom Shortcuts, add your preferred key combination, and assign it to run the command aura switcher. The floating overlay pops up instantly over your active windows and dismisses automatically on click or wallpaper selection.
Put your desktop back to life.
Free and open source, and it stays that way. Ready for COSMIC Desktop in seconds.
1-Line Installer
Automated setup for Linux x86_64
Installs Aura and bundles the mpvpaper video engine. Automatically configures the COSMIC Applications launcher.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antwny/aura/main/install.sh | bash
Distro Packages
Required runtime dependencies
sudo pacman -S --needed mpv ffmpeg
Manual Archive
Pre-compiled .tar.gz & Cargo
Download Latest Release ↗cargo install --git https://github.com/antwny/aura