Xsnow – Enable Animated Snow Falling Desktop in Linux

Christmas is coming soon! Let it snow on your Linux desktop!

Xsnow is a free and open-source software to make an animated snow falling desktop in Linux. It works on most popular desktop environments, including GNOME, KDE, FVWM, TWM, XFCE, LXDE, OPENBOX. And it supports Xscreensaver since version 3.1.6.

The software used to offer a command line only interface. Since version 2.0, it also provides an user friendly graphical user interface with ability to:

  • Snow in full-screen mode, on all workspaces.
  • Snow above / below app windows. On some DE, snow above window will make window not clickable
  • Adjust amount, color and size of snow
  • Toggle on / off snow on window, screen bottom, and scenery.
  • Choose your favorite Santa with or without Rudoplh, change Santa speed, or no Santa.
  • Compose your favorite scenery.
  • Configure wind effects, falling stars, flocking birds.

And each tab offers options to reset default, vintage, all default, and all vintage.

See Xsnow in screenshots (click to enlarge):

How to Install Xsnow in Linux:

Install xsnow in Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint:

The software offers official 32-bit (i386), 64-bit (amd64), armhf (Raspberry pi) deb packages for Debian and Ubuntu based systems.

Download the package matches your system type, then install it either via Gdebi package installer or by running command in terminal:

sudo apt install ./Downloads/xsnow*.deb

Once installed, open it from your system application launcher and enjoy!

Install xsnow in other Linux:

Besides building from the source code, ALT Linux Sisyphus, Fedora, offers the software packages in its main repositories. Just install it via system package manager though package version is a little old.

Hi, I'm Merilyn Ne, a computer geek working on Ubuntu Linux for many years and would like to write useful tips for beginners. Forgive me for language mistakes. I'm not a native speaker of English.