Fractals as a Live Wallpaper

Wed, 28 Apr 2021

Nicholas Ficara

I have always loved fractals. Something about the Mandelbrot set is so captivating to me. I've always wanted to write my own implementation of it and I've always wanted to use it as my wallpaper, so I decided why not combine both! I wrote a live wallpaper program for Linux that will render the Mandelbrot set to your X root window (desktop). It was a lot of fun to implement, and very rewarding. I wrote it in C so that it doesn't take up many resources. I am still not finished with the project. I want to make it configurable and dynamic so that you can make it zoom into a region, cycle through colors, pick another fractal, etc. Here are some of the results:

I still have to implement smoothing, but it's coming along nicely.