cellpaper

Thousands of agents lay down a chemical trail and steer towards the trails they find, which is enough on its own to produce branching transport networks that keep rewiring themselves. It is the same behaviour a real slime mould uses to solve a maze.

The obvious way to build this is a live-wallpaper extension that composites a window behind the desktop. That architecture is exactly what caused intermittent half-second cursor lag on this machine — a different extension using the same approach did the same thing — and the lightweight alternative other compositors offer is not implemented on this one.

So cellpaper never draws anything at all. It simulates headless and overwrites a single image file, and the compositor notices the file has changed and reloads it by itself. Between writes it does no extra work whatsoever, which is how a continuously animating desktop costs three percent of one core instead of a visible chunk of the machine.