Wallch, an alternative to Variety Wallpaper Changer

Wallch is a wallpaper changer that seeks to facilitate the user to have a beautiful and elegant image on their screen on a daily basis. With version 4.x, Wallch got support for Wallpaper Clocks, which are basically desktop backgrounds with clocks built into them that work like a widget it was. With this latest version you also got a Live Website feature, along with more configuration options and support for more GTK-compatible desktops.

Some interesting features from Wallch:

• Support for GNOME 3 with and without Unity, XFCE, LXDE and Mate
• Wallpaper changer: place the funds you want in a directory on your system and Wallch will take care of the rest in the time interval that you choose
• Live earth wallpaper
• Photo of the day: Download the photo of the day from Wikipedia and set it as your desktop background
• Possibility of using the Wallpaper Clocks of VladStudio
• Live Website: displays an automatically updated website given a time interval on the desktop

From the Wallch preferences, you can set the application to display notifications on every desktop change, keep a history of changed wallpapers, choose to start Wallch at startup, choose a keyboard shortcut to change the image, and many more options.

Differences with Variety

Compared to Variety, Wallch has some extra features: support for Wallpaper Clocks, Live Website and the photo of the day, pero there are also some features that are present in Variety that Wallch does not have, such as automatic downloading of wallpapers from sources that Variety uses, such as wallpapers.net, Flickr or wallbase.cc, to give a few examples. There are also no effects for images on Wallch.

As you can see, although they share a few characteristics, there are quite significant differences between Wallch and Variety. The best thing is that, as always, you decide on the one that best suits your needs.

Installing Wallch

Wallch 4 has been available for a good season in the Ubuntu 14.04 repositories, but it had a few bugs in the official package. So,we recommend using the PPA instead of installing the package that is included in the Ubuntu repositories. To add the PPA, open a terminal and type the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wallch/wallch-4.0
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wallch

Unfortunately Wallch 4 does not work in versions prior to 14.04 from Ubuntu because it depends on Qt5. If you are not using Ubuntu 14.04, then we recommend using Variety.