Are there at least some plans to implement screensavers into Wayland? Is there any way to override Wayland’s restrictions and set a screensaver up?
Are there at least some plans to implement screensavers into Wayland? Is there any way to override Wayland’s restrictions and set a screensaver up?
Why are screensavers still used?
Nothing that causes pixels to change color “saves” anything these days, unless you have some kind of old LCD display.
Wayland has no limitations for how a traditional screensaver should work, nobody bothered to implement one, that is why there isn’t one yet IMO.
Hate to be the guy but if you need one you either need to hack something on top of xscreensaver like others in the thread said, or implement something native for those that need it to protect their old monitor.
That said, in case you don’t actually need a screensaver but a looping video for a kiosk type of situation you might just setup a videoplayer in a loop and turn off screen power saving.
I have multiple monitors from different manufacturers. The setup I have completely breaks screen blanking for energy saving. I’ve spent over two years on this issue now and I’m pretty sure it’s hardware related on the monitor side. When power saving is enabled, despite two years of research, the screens power back on almost immediately, never staying off for more than a second or two. I’m poor and can’t afford new ones, so my solution is to… use a blank screensaver instead to save my screens from burn-in.
Screensavers used to save screens, but then the unionized, and now they save you from the drudgery of blank, boring, screens locked by bosses.
To be happy. The canvas can be more than a blank slate waiting to be transformed into beloved good screen or hated bad screen. Back on x11 the screensaver can also be the locker, so if you need to know it’s not a piece of crap you can pick a locker that works good (like xscreensaver).
People have been complaining that xscreensaver doesn’t work in Wayland for a decade that I’m aware of, the answer has always been “you don’t need that”. Its not that people don’t want it, its that Wayland devs have actively resisted it.
Wayland devs develop stuff for wayland and most of them work for free, those that are payd are usually payd to do stuff that is needed by their employer. Spoiler alert: employers don’t give a damn about screensavers.
If you need additional stuff you need to either develop it yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.
This attitude of pressuring devs to do the work for you works if you pay for something, in opensource it is usually frowned upon.
People can complain all they like, if it ain’t useful to those who pay or those who work on it, it won’t be done.
In my opinion that is a feature not a bug.
lol “The corporate overlords of Wayland don’t owe you feature parity, snowflake and that’s a good thing” is a hell of a take.
My point is they are not corporate overlords, that is the good thing smh
And yes, feature parity with a thing written in the eighties might not be a good idea either
the core of Wayland development, including those directing volunteer work have historically famously been people in the employ of some company directly tied to linux in some way.
There are many, many people contributing to get screensavers working on Wayland and it’s been an uphill battle for at least one decade I’m personally extensively aware of (but according to the discussions it goes all the way back) because it doesn’t matter if you write something that works, the person who maintains whatever moving target of a protocol or api or framework will just drop the part you need after arguing with you for a month that you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing.
Even if you cleverly hook into a some part that’s too deeply embedded in the Wayland monolith and too widely used by everything else to simply grind off, there’s no standard complement of Wayland components to design for and every major distribution of Wayland bits has enough tiny differences that by the time you’ve convinced, cajoled and wooed the first fiefdom into letting its users do something they’ve expected for forty years you gotta turn your attention to the next one who, rather than seeing the fragile peace you and your former enemy have struck over battle scarred handshakes and leading with diplomacy has barred the gates, manned the towers and released crocodiles into the moat. “You may have deployed the snakelike perfidy needed to get those guys to accept screensavers, but we will never accept your terms!”
Look at screenshots for a phenomenal example of how this goes down. If you have a program that takes a screenshot you don’t want to go fishing around for some indication of what particular method of waylandly accessing a frame buffer is installed and set up on the system or include a new dependency for your at one time simple seeming program, yet those are your options and when the ding dongs at gnome broke it they condescended to the users that they shouldn’t be taking screen shots!
And now I bet you’ll be in here saying “well, they’re right, users shouldn’t be able to take screen shots it’s too dangerous!”
You are completly missing my point.
I never said you should or should not do something, for all i care you can use wayland protocols in some hellbent way instead of systemd itself.
What I am saing is that it is bad form to complain the devs are not making what you want if you neither pay nor develop yourself to bring something to the table.
I said it the forth time now, I am out.
No one is doing what you’re describing. If you would like to verify that for yourself there’s a ton of well documented back and forth on various platforms that indicates a complex and long running effort.