GNOME Screensaver

gnome-screensaver is, for those who don’t know, the new screensaver solution for GNOME, with better HIG dialogs and a much better integration into the desktop than the old xscreensaver.

I have been looking and testing it lately, and after all that testing and a security audit by the SuSE security team, I can say everything works great.

There was only one thing missing, which was the lack of more screensavers by default, so went ahead and wrote a patch to make it use xscreensaver hacks by default:

This is still not in CVS, since I have a little problem with the –with-xscreensaver-hacks argument I’m adding to configure, but will be soon sent upstream.

13 thoughts on “GNOME Screensaver”

  1. Great work. Can’t wait to populate it with more screensaver.

    Have just installed 0.0.8; some things:

    the name label shows “unknow” instead of my username.
    and a picky one. the font in the progressbar of the unlock dialog is to small. 🙂
    moan

  2. I just fixed the username one, to make it use the UNIX name when the real name is not available, which is what is happening to you.

    About the small font, will look at it

  3. Great!

    But wouldn’t be better to show a sane and small (~10) selection of xscreensaver hacks by default? Like flurry, matrix, slideshow…

    This huge list is unmanageable, at least for me.

    Maybe you should provide a hidden gconf key to show all the others available if someonte wants to.

    Ciao
    Michele

  4. I hope it can do “random screensaver” as well, with checkboxes to choose which screensavers can be run at random. it’s a really really good feature of the current system.
    I don’t know if the goal is to replace the GUI at:
    http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/225/107.gif

    which I’m used to, but if it is, don’t remove too many features, I find almost all useful.

  5. I am actually worried about the “more is better” approach to screensavers. I would totally love to have only a handful of great screensavers and have the pool of average to crappy screensavers in xscreesaver optional/hidden.

  6. Jakub, I completely agree with you. I think gnome-screensaver should ship by default with something like five high quality screensavers. Users who want more just install extra screensavers.

    Already filed a bug on this in bugzilla http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=308196

    BTW I think the author of gnome screensaver William Jon McCann is thinking along the same lines. Now we just need 5 high quality screensavers.

  7. I completely agree with Jakub – The majority of the xscreensaver hacks are garish and horrible. They make the platform look unproffessional especially in the light of OSX and WinXP. Having ~50 useless screensavers makes the list less user friendly as well. I suggest having things the the Really Slick X Screensaver set included with just a few others as a start.

  8. if only the really good screensavers are included, then maybe there’s no need for checkboxes of which one to use. but i still think a “random screensaver” mode is useful.

  9. Well, if all of the screensavers will be there, could we at least have some kind of grouping? Also I’d love to see the ability to disable cpu eating screensavers – my fan sounds like a jet with some screensavers…

  10. I also hate the large number of screen savers. Just make sure there is at least one that requires OpenGL. It’s nice to have something to test that video drivers are working.

  12. Just a thought: Could the list be at some point replaced with a thumbnail icon view of the screensavers?

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