Gnome Screensaver issues?

George Barnett george at alink.co.za
Sun Mar 12 12:01:25 GMT 2006


Wouter Stomp wrote:
> On 2/21/06, Diamond Software <diamondsw at mac.com> wrote:
>> I've been following the issues regarding Gnome Screensaver on the
>> Ubuntu community forums, and just wanted to raise it here prior to
>> the UI freeze (as suggested). In a nutshell, many screensavers
>> require options to be configured and the Gnome Screensaver has no way
>> of setting these. Performance and responsiveness have also been noted
>> as problems.
>>
>> http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=120071
>>
> 
> With the feature freeze coming very soon now, could deviating from
> upstream and adding a configure button be seriously considered? In the
> mentioned forum thread there is practically an unanonymous consensus
> that the screensavers should be configurable.

Please excuse the late addition, I've been away.

One of the reasons I prefer Ubuntu and open source software to 
Windows|OS-X|Solaris is choice.  I have more choices when running my 
linux box than a windows or osx box.  I can play around and choose what 
to run and make sure I like my desktop environment.  I must like my 
desktop environment - I spend a good 8 hours in it every day - sometimes 
more.

Here's the catch though - developers need to remember that you're not 
only writing code for yourself.  You're writing for a user base.  The 
argument of 'I write for the love of it' doesn't cut it.  If you only 
write for the love of writing, then why do you commit your code upstream?

You write because you love writing, commiting and contributing to a 
community.  As a community of users, we love this as well.  We get a 
great OS and you get to do something you love - everybody wins because 
we work together, providing feedback and building a better product.

There in is the catch.  The whole process works well so long as 
developers aren't preachers.  Making informed design decisions is good, 
but making decisions of how I must use your code is bad.  Hotmail made a 
lot of money because of other software vendors kept telling people they 
could only have their email available in a mail client.  In this case, 
it's  not a huge catastrophe - I can just install xscreesaver, but what 
if I didn't know how to?  What if I didn't know xscreensaver even exists?

Luckily, I'm still left with a choice here, but are inexperienced users 
not allowed to have this choice?  Unfortunately this usually results in 
'Nice toy, I'm going back to $other_os'[1].

Screensavers have been configurable since the creation of time.  There 
are 2 reasons for this:

1) It works.
2) Nobody has come up with anything better.

In effect, what's happened here is that somebody has said that 1) is 
untrue, but has failed to action 2).  When the bug was rejected 
upstream, I think it was something like "there's a better way to do this 
with screensaver theme's" or some such, but no feature has actually been 
presented to me as a user.

Maybe there is a better way to do things.  Setting up screensaver themes 
seems like a great idea to me.  Let me try the new way so I can choose 
which I prefer.  If your new feature is good, you wont have to force it 
on me - I'll choose to run it.  I'd love to be able to set up a 
screensaver multiple times and run each variant at will, but there's the 
crunch.  I want a screensaver to run how I want it to run.  At the 
moment I'm stuck with some random developers default forced on me and a 
vague statement that there is a better way to do it, only I can't use it 
yet.

Leaves me saying "Nice toy, I'm going back to xscreensaver."

Cheers,

George


1. I've often found myself looking at a piece of hardware or software 
that only runs on a certain OS (eg RHEL or Suse) and saying 'Nice yxz, 
pity it only runs on software we dont use' and going off to find a 
different product.






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