gnome-screensaver

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

Hello,

I notice that Ubuntu is making the jump from the xscreensaver
preference program to gnome-screensaver. As it stands I think this is
mistake for several reasons, most of which have to do with not quite
simplifying things enough and leaving out important options.

A lot can be learned from KDE's wrapper around xscreensaver as it
does something similar and has hit problems that gnome-screensaver
does not bother to address. The main problem is that of not being
able to select which screensavers appear in random mode.

The Webwhacker xscreensaver is notorious for throwing up
inappropriate content. Now while today its unlikely that most users
would happen to install the extra pieces (something to provide
/usr/dict/words,  netpbm and libjpeg-progs) it is not impossible that
its requirements could change to something more slender in the
future. xscreensaver ships with this particular plugin in the off
state but since gnome-screensaver doesn't support this leading to a
potential rerun of
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=139513 At least
Ubuntu doesn't ship with random mode on by default.

I believe the answer to this is to destroy gnome-screensaver's random
option and show information about what each screensaver does (there
is no way to know using gnome-screensaver that webcollage can show
explicit content). Those who want a random mode can fetch
xscreensaver prefs (or whatever it is called) and get on/off
switches.

Secondly powersaving is a big deal. Having the preference for it
thrown out of the GUI is bad unless you are going to ship
gnome-screensaver with the default of powering down the display after
15 minutes of screensaving. I notice that Ubuntu Breezy ships with an
hdparm -B setting so a powersaving default that *may* cause problems
should be OK. Not turning off the display at all is horrible for
those of us still using CRTs.

Someone will probably say this belongs in a bug report however I'm a
bit skeptical about this. I believe a good bug is something like:
"Saving a screenshot png with a jpeg extension causes eye of the
gnome to crash." This is more of a discussion topic...

Sitsofe | http://sucs.org/~sits/


		
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