Every fifteen minutes or so, I have my desktop wallpaper changing to a fresh satellite image of Earth. Sometimes it shows Africa and Europe from the Meteosat satellite. Sometimes it shifts to the Pacific and Australasia, seen from Japan’s Himawari-9. Both are near real-time images from geostationary satellites orbiting above the equator.

Here is how to cook it up on Debian 13 (Trixie) with KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland.

Ingrediants

• Debian 13 (Trixie) with KDE Plasma 6, running a Wayland session

• Himawaripy: a Python tool that downloads the latest image from Japan’s Himawari-9 weather satellite, centred over the Pacific. It saves a timestamped PNG to a local folder.
  The project is no longer maintained but continues to work just fine. I installed it via pipx rather than apt because it is not packaged in Debian, and requires setuptools to be manually injected as a dependency after installation.

• A custom shell script to download the latest natural colour image from EUMETSAT’s Meteosat satellite, centred over Africa and Europe. No account or API key required.

• Variety: a wallpaper manager that rotates through images in a local folder on a schedule, calling a custom script to apply each one.

• plasma-apply-wallpaperimage: the tool I use for changing wallpapers on KDE Plasma 6 with Wayland. The older qdbus/dbus-send approach used in other guides does not work on Wayland.

Method

Step 1: Install pipx and Himawaripy

1sudo apt install pipx
2pipx ensurepath

and then:

1pipx install himawaripy
2pipx inject himawaripy setuptools

Himawaripy was written to download imagery from the Himawari-8 satellite. Himawari-9 replaced Himawari-8 as the operational satellite but uses an identical data format and feed structure, so Himawaripy continues to work without modification.

Step 2: Create the Image Folders

1mkdir -p ~/.himawari ~/.eumetsat ~/.satellite-wallpapers
2ln -s ~/.himawari ~/.satellite-wallpapers/himawari
3ln -s ~/.eumetsat ~/.satellite-wallpapers/eumetsat

Step 3: Create the EUMETSAT Download Script

 1cat > ~/.local/bin/eumetsat-download << 'EOF'
 2#!/bin/bash
 3OUTDIR="$HOME/.eumetsat"
 4TIMESTAMP=$(date -u +"%Y%m%dT%H%M00")
 5OUTFILE="$OUTDIR/meteosat-${TIMESTAMP}.jpg"
 6if [ ! -f "$OUTFILE" ]; then
 7    curl -sf "https://eumetview.eumetsat.int/static-images/latestImages/EUMETSAT_MSG_RGBNatColour_FullResolution.jpg" \
 8        -o "$OUTFILE" && echo "Downloaded: $OUTFILE"
 9    ls -t "$OUTDIR"/meteosat-*.jpg | tail -n +7 | xargs -r rm
10fi
11EOF
12chmod +x ~/.local/bin/eumetsat-download

The script adds a UTC timestamp to each filename so Variety and plasma-apply-wallpaperimage always recognise it as a new image. It also keeps only the six most recent images to save disk space.

Step 4: Test Both Sources

1himawaripy --auto-offset -l 4 --dont-change --output-dir ~/.himawari
2eumetsat-download
3ls ~/.himawari ~/.eumetsat

Each folder should now contain one timestamped image.

Step 5: Set Up Cron Jobs

1crontab -e

Add both lines:

*/10 * * * * /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.local/bin/himawaripy --auto-offset -l 4 --dont-change --output-dir /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.himawari
*/15 * * * * /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.local/bin/eumetsat-download

The --auto-offset flag automatically calculates the correct time offset for the satellite feed, and -l 4 sets the resolution level with level 4 being the highest available.
The --dont-change flag tells Himawaripy to download the image without trying to change the wallpaper itself, leaving that to Variety and the shell script.

Himawari-9 updates every 10 minutes; Meteosat updates every 15 minutes.

Step 6: Install Variety and Create the Wallpaper Script

1sudo apt install variety
2mkdir -p ~/.config/variety/scripts
3cat > ~/.config/variety/scripts/set_wallpaper << 'EOF'
4#!/bin/bash
5echo "$(date) set_wallpaper called with: $1" >> /tmp/variety_wallpaper.log
6plasma-apply-wallpaperimage --fill-mode preserveAspectFit "$1" >> /tmp/variety_wallpaper.log 2>&1
7EOF
8chmod +x ~/.config/variety/scripts/set_wallpaper

The --fill-mode preserveAspectFit flag ensures the full Earth image is always visible against the black of space, rather than being cropped to fill the screen.

Step 7: Configure Variety

Open Variety preferences from the system tray:

• Sources tab: Add ~/.satellite-wallpapers as a Local Folder, remove all other sources
• General tab: Set the change interval to 16 minutes

Step 8: Set the KDE Fill Mode

Right-click the desktop → Configure Desktop and Wallpaper → set Positioning to Scaled, Keep Proportions → Apply.

Step 9: Test

1variety --next
2cat /tmp/variety_wallpaper.log

You should see a line ending in Successfully set the wallpaper for all desktops.

How It Looks

Both images update throughout the day and the wallpaper should alternate between two perspectives of Earth. Meteosat shows Europe, Africa, and the Atlantic.

Himawari-9 shows the Pacific, Japan, Australia, and Southeast Asia.