[ubuntu-studio-devel] xfce4-screensaver

[Ross Gammon]

Hi Erich,

On 3/10/19 12:43 AM, Erich Eickmeyer wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Sean Davis (bluesabre) did an amazing job and ported mate-screensaver to
> xfce4-screensaver. The motivation, as I understand it, is because
> light-locker is largely unmaintained and causes a race condition when
> resuming from sleep due to the vt change (or something like that, we
> don't need to get too technical on this).
> 
> With that, light-locker and xscreensaver are being largely depricated by
> the Xubuntu team (who can correct me if I'm wrong... well, anybody can
> correct me) in favor of xfce4-screensaver. I think this change, if it
> needs to happen in our seeds, needs to happen.
> 
> If you want to test it first, that's good practice. That said, I can say
> from personal experience that I have experienced the light-locker race
> condition myself, and it's definitely not a good bug to have.
> 
> Anyhow, we don't need to make this change immediately. Our priority
> right now is the Developer Membership Board meeting happening on Monday
> at 1500 UTC (I may have posted that this was at 1200 UTC, that was a
> mistake) for mine and Ross's applications for Per-Package Uploader
> permissions. My application, I expect, will be rejected due to lack of
> experience, so I'm in it mostly for the feedback. However, we're hoping
> for success with Ross's application, which is getting a lot of support
> at present.
> 
> With that, I want to say that this change in the seed, if necessary,
> isn't as high of a priority, but it would bring some good bug fixes to
> our default Xfce desktop.

The last time we discussed screensavers was quite a while ago when Kai
was still in charge and we decided to remove our Ubuntu Studio
screensaver package becasue it was broken and we didn't have it in the
seeds anyway.

There was some discussion about the use of screensavers in general and
it was decided that in the days of flatscreens the original purpose has
disappeared, and the fact that in audio and video we might want to watch
some rendering/mastering chuntering along for quite a while, that
screensavers did not make much sense. I think the power management
settings would need to be fiddled with to get the screensaver to work
instead of blanking.

But I suppose we could test it as a replacement for light-locker and see
how it goes with audio/video work. I have not had a computer with a
screen saver for so many years (at work or at home), I have forgotten
what it is like :-)

Ross