Today’s artwork as your desktop wallpaper

A small free program that sets today’s Morning Masterpiece artwork as your desktop wallpaper and changes it when the next one is published. For Linux, macOS and Windows. No account, no tracking.

What it does

It downloads today’s artwork from morningmasterpiece.com and sets it as your wallpaper. It checks every hour and when you log in, and downloads a picture only when a new day’s artwork is out, so most checks are one small request. When you are offline, it keeps the last picture. It installs for your user only and does not change system settings.

Install on Linux or macOS

Open a terminal and run:

curl -fsSLo /tmp/mmw https://morningmasterpiece.com/desktop-wallpaper/morning-masterpiece-wallpaper && sh /tmp/mmw install

No curl? This does the same with wget:

wget -qO /tmp/mmw https://morningmasterpiece.com/desktop-wallpaper/morning-masterpiece-wallpaper && sh /tmp/mmw install

This copies the program to ~/.local/bin/morning-masterpiece-wallpaper, schedules it, and sets today’s wallpaper right away. On Linux the schedule is a systemd user timer, or an hourly cron job if there is no systemd user session. On macOS it is a launchd agent. To see what it found, run ~/.local/bin/morning-masterpiece-wallpaper status.

Piping the download straight into sh will not work for install: the program installs by copying its own file, so it has to be saved first.

Read it before you run it

curl -fsSLo morning-masterpiece-wallpaper https://morningmasterpiece.com/desktop-wallpaper/morning-masterpiece-wallpaper
less morning-masterpiece-wallpaper
sha256sum morning-masterpiece-wallpaper    # on macOS: shasum -a 256 morning-masterpiece-wallpaper
sh morning-masterpiece-wallpaper install

The checksum must match the SHA-256 in the list below.

Install on Windows

Open PowerShell (Windows 10 or 11) and run:

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iwr -UseBasicParsing https://morningmasterpiece.com/desktop-wallpaper/morning-masterpiece-wallpaper.ps1 -OutFile "$env:TEMP\mmw.ps1"; powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "$env:TEMP\mmw.ps1" install

This copies the script to %LOCALAPPDATA%\MorningMasterpiece\Wallpaper\bin, adds a Task Scheduler task for your user, “Morning Masterpiece Wallpaper”, that runs at logon and every hour, and sets today’s wallpaper right away. -ExecutionPolicy Bypass applies to this one command only. You don’t need to change your execution policy. The task runs the script the same way.

Read it before you run it

iwr -UseBasicParsing https://morningmasterpiece.com/desktop-wallpaper/morning-masterpiece-wallpaper.ps1 -OutFile "$env:TEMP\mmw.ps1"
notepad "$env:TEMP\mmw.ps1"
Get-FileHash "$env:TEMP\mmw.ps1"
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "$env:TEMP\mmw.ps1" install

Get-FileHash prints the SHA-256 in upper case. It must match the list below.

Uninstall

Linux and macOS:

~/.local/bin/morning-masterpiece-wallpaper uninstall

Windows (PowerShell):

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\MorningMasterpiece\Wallpaper\bin\morning-masterpiece-wallpaper.ps1" uninstall

This removes the schedule and the program. Add --purge (Windows: -Purge) to also delete the cached images and settings. Your current wallpaper stays until you choose another one. On Omarchy, your previous background comes back if the artwork is still showing.

Supported desktops

  • Omarchy (through Omarchy’s own background command, so switching themes still works)
  • Hyprland with hyprpaper or swaybg
  • sway, and other Wayland compositors with swaybg
  • GNOME (also Ubuntu, Budgie and Pantheon), Cinnamon and MATE
  • KDE Plasma
  • XFCE
  • Other X11 window managers (i3, bspwm, Openbox …) with feh
  • macOS
  • Windows 10 and 11 (Windows PowerShell 5.1 or PowerShell 7)

On Linux it needs only curl or wget. For anything else, you can give it your own command in ~/.config/morning-masterpiece-wallpaper/config, for example backend = custom and command = swww img "$1".

Privacy

The program only fetches https://morningmasterpiece.com/api/today.json and the wallpaper image from morningmasterpiece.com. It refuses image links to any other site. It sends no data: no tracking, no analytics, no IDs. Requests carry a plain User-Agent, morning-masterpiece-wallpaper/1.0.0, and nothing about your computer. Links it prints or opens carry utm_source=wallpaper. That tag is the same for everyone and identifies nobody. Requests to this site are covered by the privacy notice.

Files and checksums

Both in sha256sum format: SHA256SUMS.

Early release

This is version 1.0.0. It has been tested on Linux, where it set the wallpaper on an X11 desktop with feh. It has not yet been tried on real macOS or Windows machines, or on real Omarchy, Hyprland, sway, GNOME, KDE Plasma or XFCE desktops. If something does not work, please write to hello@morningmasterpiece.com and include the output of the status command.

Prefer to set it by hand?

Every artwork has wallpaper downloads for desktop and phone screens. Start with today’s wallpaper, or browse all wallpapers.

License

MIT License, © Morning Masterpiece. Full license text. The artworks themselves are in the public domain.