Do any European space agencies make live weather imagery available at high resolution? I'm looking for a direct link to JPEGs that update regularly, to use with a cron script to use as desktop wallpaper.

I can easily do this for North America using imagery here, for example: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/conus.php?sat=G16 (bonus, imagery is Public Domain).

This direct link provides an updated image every five minutes, with even higher resolution available if you like: https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES19/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/2...

Every time I revisit this idea and look for western Europe, I find nothing. Or, very low resolution, or some clunky, proprietary "viewer" forced on users. Is there really nothing similar for Europe?

You can receive a lot of weather satellites with self-build equipment utilizing the tool "SatDump". But: the good old times of 137MHz analog satellite pictures are over. We talking about digital high-rate X-Band stuff (~8GHz) that requires auto-tracked dishes here.

Sentiel-2 data can be pulled for free from the Copernicus service. It's a LEO sat and you often get a picture every 2 days of the same region.

DWD (German Meteo Service) offers a metric ton of data on their FTP Server as public data.

https://highsight.dev/ should work for that!