DesktopHut vs Fresco

DesktopHut offers a library of live wallpapers and software for displaying them on desktop and mobile devices. Its site lists more than 67,000 live and animated wallpapers organized by categories and tags. The built-in Motion Photo Editor turns photos into animated wallpapers using 65 motion presets and about 30 particle assets. It can export MP4, GIF and WebP files, HTML live wallpapers, or native .dh packages. DesktopHut Studio supports different wallpapers on multiple displays, span mode and restoration of per-monitor assignments. Performance controls include hardware decoding, quality settings, FPS limits, Low Resource Mode and automatic pausing during fullscreen apps, games and screen lock. Studio supports video, animated and static image files; DesktopHut wallpapers in standard MP4 format are also compatible with Wallspace for macOS, Lively Wallpaper and Wallpaper Engine. The free Studio plan is for Windows 10/11 64-bit, has no subscription or premium tier, and is limited to personal, non-commercial use. DesktopHut describes its community as enthusiasts, gamers and artists.

Fresco is a Linux desktop app for setting video, GIF, slideshow, image, and playlist wallpapers as animated backgrounds. Slideshows can use transitions, and the app includes a catalog of curated, licensed wallpapers. Each monitor can have its own wallpaper, selected from a wallpaper’s context menu. Four widgets are available: synced lyrics, a clock, an audio visualiser, and album art on a turning record. Lyrics follow media over MPRIS, checking local .lrc files before LRCLIB. Video playback uses GPU hardware decoding through mpv with VA-API or NVDEC. Fresco supports X11 and the Wayland layer-shell compositors COSMIC, Hyprland, Sway, and KDE Plasma 6. On GNOME Wayland it displays a still frame, and widgets are unavailable because there is no live wallpaper surface. It can pause on battery or when a window goes fullscreen on a display. A daemon keeps wallpapers running after the app closes and restores them after reboot. Fresco is free forever, licensed under GPL-3.0, and made by Dibbayajyoti Roy. Distribution options include a one-line installer, a .deb release, and the deepin App Store.