Different wallpaper per-monitor

I used to use Hydrapaper to set a different wallpaper on each monitor, but it’s broken as of F36. I see the “spanned” scaling option is also gone, so I can’t stitch the images together in GIMP. feh doesn’t work either, presumably due to Wayland. As a result, I’m stuck with the cool new color-changing wallpapers cropped and zoomed-in 300% on my portrait monitor.

It seems like this was a deliberate choice from the GNOME developers: The big background cleanup (#4936) · Issues · GNOME / gnome-shell · GitLab

Can anyone suggest a workaround? I’m trying to stick with Wayland.

Did you try the flatpak of hydrapaper from flathub, it looks to be more up to date.

I did, but no dice. The flatpak at least opens, but it doesn’t have any effect on the wallpaper image.

Answering my own question for once…I just built HydraPaper from source, and it seems to be working great on f36!

Turns out that the versions I had tried so far were out-of-date. The repo currently has version 3.2.0, Flathub has 3.1.0, latest is 3.3.1. (Go figure—Flathub is actually more out-of-date than the normal repos.) It has support for separate light/dark themes, which I don’t really use, but it’s still a cool feature.

I would encourage the repo maintainers to update this package, since it’s basically broken on F36.

FWIW,

Hydrapaper is broken in Fedora 37, no matter what install method is used. The latest reported version as of today is 3.3.1. The app opens and folders can be added but as soon as the folder selection window closes none of the wallpapers appear below the monitors.