How do I create my own real time updating wallpaper

I have some basic experience with opengl and was thinking that I would love to have an animated wallpaper that also factors in some properties about my machine (such as sound volume,cpu usage etc.) now I understand that in order to do this I would have to create a basic opengl program (I already have a simple test of just a black screen) and then somehow connect it to my wallpaper. Does anybody know how to do this? What about using it as a screen saver?

Here is my basic example opengl, right now it's just a black screen but I will be adding texts and other things to it over the next few days.

#include <GL/glew.h>
#include <GL/glut.h>

int WIDTH=1080;
int HEIGHT=800;

void CreateDisplay(int argc, char** argv){
    glutInit(&argc, argv);
    glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_SINGLE | GLUT_RGB);
    glutInitWindowSize(WIDTH, HEIGHT);
    glutInitWindowPosition(glutGet(GLUT_SCREEN_WIDTH) / 2 - WIDTH / 2, glutGet(GLUT_SCREEN_HEIGHT) / 2 - HEIGHT / 2);
    glutCreateWindow("background");
}

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    CreateDisplay(argc, argv);
    glutMainLoop();
}

I have already seen in Active Web Site as Gnome Background that it's possible to output a file to disk and then use a simple loop to update that file constantly, however I'm worried that doing so several times a second(30) will harm both my SSD and general system performance(as opposed to a simple program running on my gpu outputting straight to desktop). I have also seen that live wallpaper however that's only supported up to ubuntu 16.04.

For my final end product I want to be able to pull data from servers and my local computer in order to give a sort of "system overview" when on the desktop.

This is in ubuntu 17.10.