Another Benefit To Wayland: Its Screensaver

[mugginz]

Whether or not you believe a screensaver should display a beautiful image or animation or not is one thing, but when you lock your screen so it prevents people from either being able to use the machine or read the contents of the screen, it needs to do that properly and reliably.

The way things are now, if you can arrange it so that the screen saver process dies, bingo, you're back in to the machine. But even if you can't manage that, usually when you hit a key after the screen saver has been started, you get a flicker of the contents of the screen under the screen saver. Not very private, and is one thing that will get addressed by this improvement.

[BlackStar]

Last time i used a screen saver was at a party. Projecting it on the people with a DLP makes a great substitute for laser

They may be usefull for some other specific stuff, but mostly not

I do set up the screen saver and monitor power off to a dt of 1 min between them. This way if i need the screen i have a "warning" before the screen goes off, so i can save some power cycles to it and maybe prolong its life this way

This is a pretty good idea, actually! I think I'll try this myself.

[Ashc]

Last time i used a screen saver was at a party. Projecting it on the people with a DLP makes a great substitute for laser

They may be usefull for some other specific stuff, but mostly not

I do set up the screen saver and monitor power off to a dt of 1 min between them. This way if i need the screen i have a "warning" before the screen goes off, so i can save some power cycles to it and maybe prolong its life this way

[tuke81]

Oh boy, let screensavers die along with crts...

[deanjo]

I could understand it if it was to be a piece of static art in the case you have a beautiful LED screen mounted to your livingroom wall

And there are people like that. Once walked into a home where the guy had 9 30" Apple Cinema displays on a wall with the Euphoria screensaver running for "decor" purposes. At the time that was about 30k worth of displays.

[psycho_driver]

Count me in with the "screensavers are useless" crowd. I think '98 was the last time I even had one enabled on a machine.

[V!NCENT]

you underestimate the effect and how important beauty is for the people. Even if it is without purpose watching something beautiful on the screen > blanc screen.

I could understand it if it was to be a piece of static art in the case you have a beautiful LED screen mounted to your livingroom wall, otherwise I realy don't see the point of having screensavers.

The purpose of an OS is not to entertain your office neighbours. By your reason for beauty; maybe we should make a dialog in Fedora whenever you home partition is decrypted, like this:



Cool, huh?

[89c51]

My computer's purpose is to help me do whatever I want/must, not entertaining other people.

That said screensavers are ten times more stupid than MS Clippy (yeah I just said that) because they have absolutely zero purpose. And if you want entertainment than Clippy's animation are more entertaining than stinking midget feet (Gnome screensaver) supposedly walking all over the inside of your screen.

No thanks...

you underestimate the effect and how important beauty is for the people. Even if it is without purpose watching something beautiful on the screen > blanc screen.

As for the argument of power consumption i believe its up to the user to decide.

[elanthis]

Ctrl-Alt-Del is required for _any_ security on the local console. It has nothing to do with screensavers. Any app can just pop open a full screen window and trap the standard close window and switch window key bindings.

Ctrl-Alt-Del does nothing for the average idiot who just does whatever the pixels on the screen tell them to do, but it's pretty useful for those of us who understand computers and frequently work in public labs (like, say, at universities).

That said, another feature I desperately want in lock dialogs, password dialogs, and so on is a "custom hash image." Generate a colored geometric image unique to each user. Make it stored somewhere that only secure/root processes can access. Display it on all dialogs. And important, don't let non-privileged processes read those pixels (including screenshot tools, user-space compositors, etc.) Yes, that basically goes back to requiring the compositor to run as root, or at least to run with some particular SELinux context. But then it's immediately obvious if a password dialog is "real" or not, and even normal users have a chance of _noticing_ that something is amiss. If you put a "YOUR COMPUTER IS HACKED IF THIS IMAGE EVER CHANGES" warning on the standard dialog, it might just be enough to help 2% of computer users.

In any event though, not implementing the Ctrl-Alt-Del type safety just because most users don't use/understand it is really stupid, because that means that it's impossible for smarter users to ever protect themselves from trojan password dialogs.

[FunkyRider]

What if someone uses this to display faked login window to your internet bank account or so? Completely locking screen is not a good security feature, unless you also implement Windows Ctrl+Alt+Del override-world key.