I am the creator and maintainer of a somewhat popular wayland wallpaper manager: swww. swww has two killer features:

• supports setting wallpapers without restarting the daemon
• supports animated wallpapers with animated gifs or animated pngs

When I first created it, these things did not really exist in the wayland ecosystem. Stuff like swaybg, despite being very well built, only support setting a single wallpaper on startup. This means, if you want to change the wallpaper during runtime, you must pkill the daemon, and then start it again. This led to your background being completely dark during the in-between time while you restarted the daemon. Even a script automating the process could still have a quick flash, and even if it didn't, it still made the transition seem very abrupt. So swww allows you to change that at runtime, with a nice-looking transition animation that's quite pleasant.

Regarding animated wallpapers, mpvpaper existed before swww, and it works quite well if you want to use video as your wallpaper. Unfortunately, I found it to consume far too much CPU and RAM when I used it for simple animated images. At the time, I had a dual monitor setup, and I had to fire up one mpvpaper instance per monitor, which made it use quite a bit of resources. swww does not support video, but it is far better at using animated images like gifs and apngs.

The project has become more popular than I initially anticipated. Many people came in with feature requests, bug reports, PRs, and sometimes even just simple words of appreciation. I am very grateful to all my users, and I take care not to break their setups, though truthfully I may have done that quite a few times now 😅.

swww means a lot to me, as my first Open Source project, as something I did that has a fair amount of users, and as a codebase I have spent a long time developing. In fact, you can see my growth as a programmer by going through its git history. I began using a bunch of libraries that exposed high-level APIs and slowly trimmed the code base more and more, reimplemented many low-level functions manually, until it arrived at what it looks like today.

Regreattably, swww has a rather nasty history regarding its name, something that has been eating away at me for some time now.

The first name: fswww

If you go through the project's git history, you will find that it used to have a different name: fswww. This stood for "the Final Solution to your Wayland Wallpaper Woes". Now, hopefully I needn't explain to you what Final Solution is a reference for, but I sure as hell would have appreciated if someone could have pointed it out to me at the time. I simply thought the name sounded cool, and thus it was so was called during its initial lifetime.

The second name: swww

This commit then changed the project's name to swww, dropping the "final". I wish I could say it is because I had realized what a grotesque mistake I had made, but what happened was that I thought "fina" was too pretentious. After all, a better program could come along and make swww obsolete. There is was no reason to believe swww would forever be the last word in wayland wallpaper managing. And so the name changed to reflect my new-found humbleness.

The Ukraine and Russian war

And then the was happened. And then This article was published. And then it hit me: "oh my God this is a nazy reference. Oh my fucking God it is literally a Holocaust reference, of all things".

So yeah, the project's initial name was a Holocaust reference. I cannot put into words how stupid I feel, to this day, and how much I regret my naming choice. I wished I had used anything else. But it was done. The name was (and still is) plastered all over the git history if you look far back enough.

For a long time (3 years now), I've tried to simply ignore and forget about it. It was a dumb mistake, but project's name had changed. I already had users and did not want to inconvenience them with another name change. I did not want to publicly admit I made a fucking Holocaust reference of all things.

But, since then, the world has become more and more divided. Extreme right-wing movements seem to be popping up everywhere, and gaining an alarming amount of support. I do not wish be associated with any of this in any way, shape or form. I do not want for people to look at the git history and come to any misunderstandings. And so I am writing this post.

This has been haunting me for some time now. The idea someone could look at the git history and call me a nazi because I've the used the God-damned "final solution" name has literally kept me up a few nights. In fact, I've come to dislike the current name as well. Perhaps this may sound silly, but the seeing the word "solution" every time I open the main GitHub page has begun to cause me genuine distress.

I reached out to Drew DeVault, someone who's very outspoken about the presence of extreme right-wing sympathisers in the Open Source community, and he gave me the wise advice that perhaps I should choose a name I love, rather than one I won't be ashamed of. I have taken his words to heart, and am thus renaming the project to...

awww - an Answer to your Wayland Wallpaper Woes

Honestly, I feel kind of dumb not to have done this sooner. The new name's acronym is quite cute, and completely sidesteps the annoying nazy vibes I was getting before.

As a bonus, because the project's name is changing anyway, I've decided to move it to codeberg. This is something I've thought of doing for a while, but avoided it because I didn't want to break downstream.

To my users: thanks for sticking with me through these years. I have a few plans for making awww even more resource efficient. Including possibly making it idle with less than 1MB on linux systems!

To the package maintainers: I am breaking downstream again. Sorry about that. I've come to realize you are doing some insane work maintaining all these packages, and I apologize for increasing your workload.