I am trying to use feh to set the background image, but it fails (feh --bg-max {image-file}). The feh command succeeds, but the image doesn't change. It did work until some point, after which it stopped without an obvious reason. FreeBSD 12, xfce4-desktop-4.12.4 installed from the ports.
Did you make sure that xfdesktop is not running? It will continue to manage the desktop otherwise. $ xfdesktop --quit
For xfdesktop you can use the xfconf-query command to set the background image: $ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -l | grep last-image $ xfconf-query -c xfce4-desktop -p /backdrop/screen0/monitor0/workspace0/last-image -s "/path/to/image-file"
Most HOWTOs explaining how to change a wallpaper from the command line recommend 'feh', 'nitrogen', or 'gsettings': * https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Feh#Set_the_wallpaper * https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Nitrogen#Setting_wallpaper * http://www.bristolwatch.com/debian/feh.htm They never say that in case of xfce4 'xfdesktop --quit' also needs to be run. This makes xfce4 an outlier defeating the standard way of doing this. If each DE required such special step there would have been no single standard way of doing this. xfdesktop should be automatically disabled when the command line method is used, like other DEs behave.
From the ArchWiki article: "feh can be used to set the desktop wallpaper, for example for window managers without this feature such as Openbox, Fluxbox, and xmonad." This does not apply to Xfce which is a desktop environment and not just a window manager. Would it not make sense to include "Xfce" in your search query when looking up information? Note: each DE does have a different application that manages the desktop, and nitrogen actually supports various of them (including Xfce). See: https://github.com/l3ib/nitrogen/blob/master/src/SetBG.cc#L35
Thanks for your answer. I suggested this project to use 'nitrogen' instead of 'feh': https://github.com/pigmonkey/goesimage