neiam-device

Branding packages for neiam devices, published as .deb and .rpm through the same pipeline as ppl.

Package	Installs to
neiam-branding	nothing; depends on all of the below
plymouth-theme-neiam	/usr/share/plymouth/themes/neiam/
sddm-theme-neiam	/usr/share/sddm/themes/neiam/
plasma-wallpaper-neiam	/usr/share/wallpapers/neiam/ (desktop and lock screen)
plasma-wallpaper-neiam-moire	/usr/share/plasma/wallpapers/org.neiam.moire/ (animated; desktop and lock screen)
plasma-splash-neiam	/usr/share/plasma/look-and-feel/org.neiam.desktop/ (splash after login)

Both are architecture-independent (all / noarch).

Images

Every background is rendered per resolution rather than scaled from one master, and each theme picks the render that best fits the screen (matching aspect ratio first, then least scaling, preferring to shrink):

plymouth/theme/background-<W>x<H>.png
sddm/theme/backgrounds/<W>x<H>.png
wallpaper/theme/contents/images/<W>x<H>.png

at 1280x800, 1366x768, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2560x1600 and 3840x2160.

The files committed now are stand-ins: solid #651d1d with a #fef3c7 moire fading out into it. Blender renders replace them by overwriting the file at the same path; nothing else needs to change.

tools/standins.py           # write any missing stand-ins (needs numpy, Pillow)
tools/standins.py --force   # rewrite them all
tools/standins.py --check   # every image present at its size? (CI runs this)

The Plasma splash has no images of its own: it shows the installed wallpaper package’s, so login hands off to a desktop using that wallpaper without a visible change.

Adding or dropping a resolution means editing four lists together: RESOLUTIONS in tools/standins.py, the bg_* table in plymouth/theme/neiam.script, backgrounds in sddm/theme/theme.conf, and backgrounds in splash/theme/contents/splash/Splash.qml. Plasma finds the wallpaper’s sizes by itself.

The Plymouth theme is copied into the initramfs, so every render there adds to its size.

Animated wallpaper

plasma-wallpaper-neiam-moire is a Plasma wallpaper plugin (“neiam moire” under Wallpaper type, for the desktop or the lock screen) that draws its patterns live: the moire, a halftone field, both, bokeh (soft out-of-focus discs drifting upward and fading in and out as they rise, 4 to 64 of them, each its own shade from the primary towards the accent and from muted to vivid), or a starfield (sparse stars, mostly faint and a few bright, each twinkling at its own rate). It can also fade back and forth between any two of those every few minutes. Effects, each a checkbox and usable with any pattern: a glint, a band of light sweeping across the rings and dots every minute and a half; breathing, the pattern slowly swelling and easing; a few large defocused discs drifting past in front now and then, like a light close to the lens; film grain; and dither (on by default), which keeps the slow dark gradients from banding on 8-bit displays. Everything drifts slowly and never visibly repeats.

Its colours come from the waxx themes (dark, light, her, afterdark, forest, sky, clays, stones, blueprint): the ground is base-100 fading to base-300, the moire accent, the halftone primary. It can hold one theme and pattern, or follow the time of day through night, sunrise, day and sunset, each phase with its own theme and pattern (by default a starfield at night, bokeh at sunrise, moire and halftone by day, moire at sunset), either by clock times or by the real sun at a latitude and longitude. Between phases both blend by the sun’s elevation: the patterns crossfade, and the colours turn the hue so the transitions pass through the purples of a real twilight rather than grey.

A checkbox writes “NEIAM” in the bottom right corner, in the theme’s accent colour, in B612 Mono Bold at 12% of the screen height, with sliders for its opacity and for a soft glow around it; the package pulls in the font (fonts-b612 / firstyear-b612-fonts).

Settings trade smoothness for power: frame rate (30 by default) and speed, where 0 holds a still frame and costs nothing after drawing it.

moire/shaders/field.frag              shader source
moire/theme/contents/ui/field.frag.qsb  compiled; run tools/shaders.sh after editing
moire/theme/contents/ui/themes.js       generated; tools/themes.py ../waxx/assets/css/app.css
moire/theme/contents/ui/schedule.js     sun position and theme blending
moire/theme/contents/ui/Field.qml       the picture, without Plasma

Field.qml is plain QtQuick, so it can be rendered outside Plasma. Offscreen rendering needs the GPU path, or the shader is skipped:

QT_QUICK_BACKEND=rhi QSG_RHI_BACKEND=opengl QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen qml6 ...

Enabling

Installing a package does not switch to its theme:

# Plymouth (rebuilds the initramfs)
sudo plymouth-set-default-theme -R neiam                 # Fedora / openSUSE
sudo update-alternatives --set default.plymouth \
    /usr/share/plymouth/themes/neiam/neiam.plymouth \
    && sudo update-initramfs -u                          # Debian / Ubuntu

# SDDM
printf '[Theme]\nCurrent=neiam\n' | sudo tee /etc/sddm.conf.d/neiam.conf

Per user, in System Settings: the wallpaper under Wallpaper and Screen Locking → Appearance (as the “Image” type for the stills, or “neiam moire” for the animated one), the splash under Splash Screen (or plasma-apply-wallpaperimage /usr/share/wallpapers/neiam and kwriteconfig6 --file ksplashrc --group KSplash --key Theme org.neiam.desktop).

KDE’s settings show sddm/theme/preview.png and splash/theme/contents/previews/*.png; re-render them after changing the themes or their art:

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen qml6 tools/sddm-preview.qml
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen qml6 tools/splash-preview.qml

Try the login screen and splash without switching to them:

sddm-greeter-qt6 --test-mode --theme sddm/theme
ksplashqml --test --window splash/theme

Building

The packages are data-only cargo crates so that cargo-deb and cargo-generate-rpm apply as they do for ppl:

cargo deb -p plymouth-theme-neiam --no-build --no-strip
cargo deb -p sddm-theme-neiam --no-build --no-strip
cargo deb -p plasma-wallpaper-neiam --no-build --no-strip
cargo deb -p plasma-wallpaper-neiam-moire --no-build --no-strip
cargo deb -p plasma-splash-neiam --no-build --no-strip
cargo deb -p neiam-branding --no-build --no-strip
tools/deb-fixup.sh target/debian/*.deb
cargo generate-rpm -p plymouth -a noarch
cargo generate-rpm -p sddm -a noarch
cargo generate-rpm -p wallpaper -a noarch
cargo generate-rpm -p moire -a noarch
cargo generate-rpm -p splash -a noarch
cargo generate-rpm -p branding -a noarch

cargo-deb can’t mark a package Architecture: all and writes an empty Depends: for packages with nothing to link, so tools/deb-fixup.sh corrects the control file afterwards.

CI (.github/workflows/package.yml) does the above on every push, stamping +dev.<timestamp> onto branch builds and publishing to the forge’s deb and rpm registries. Releases use ./release.sh as in ppl: a v* tag publishes the bare version.