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?
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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.
- 1 day
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.
2 daysScreensavers 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.
- 3 days
There’s screen lockers. Is there a reason why programs like swaylock couldn’t play an animation instead of showing a static image? Am I missing a reason why it’s structurally impossible?
- 3 days
Hadn’t thought about it before since i don’t have a need for them, but yeah i think that could work with swaylock, cause i’m pretty sure you can configure it in such a way that the static indicator isn’t on the screen the whole time. I don’t know if it can do video files, but you might be able to use a gif instead. Only downside would be that you still have to enter your password to get rid of it again, which isn’t typical for a screensaver i think.
- 3 days
I’m just confused as some comments seem to suggest it’s not possible. There are already idle daemons like swayidle, so you just need to have an idle daemon execute a program that plays an animation and exits when it receives any input? I don’t know of any such programs, but I don’t see how it’d be impossible.
If there are any plans I don’t know but what I can tell you is that there’s currently no way to circumvent these “restrictions” - because there are none.
Although from a user perspective it feels like something got taken away from Wayland perspective it’s the other way arou d: screensavers want rights that Wayland simply doesn’t provide to any user space application.
A screensaver needs to track user interaction globally (for the timeout), overlay over existing apps, manipulate viewport properties, manage the session and similar things, depending on the details.
Depending on what you want there might be ways to hack something together though.
Then there’s of course the disclaimer that although I’m not ab LLM my training data (aka experience) might be out of date :D
- 3 days
It sounds like something the session lock protocol can be used for
Just installed xscreensaver and it works more or less. i don’t think it can screenlock but haven’t tested everything. Just popped up a terminal and ran
xscreensaver-settingsand it asked if I wanted to run the server. Picked a few savers off the list changed the times and waited. Only working on one desktop but that doesn’t bother me. A little buggy, hard to get it to stop with a mouse wiggle or keypress. Have to switch desktops and kill the pid. Better than it was a year ago though. Might work better in kde than in hyprland?Using Arch, wayland, xorg-wayland
- 3 days
Set a systemd timer to start mpv in fullscreen with whatever you want as the screensaver in a loop
- 3 days
I’m on Kubuntu 24.04 and I got xscreensaver working in Wayland.
You have to log into an X11 session first and set up xscreensaver how you want it. Once it’s set up and working, log out of the X11 session and log back into the Wayland session.
Go to the System Settings and look for Autostart. Make an autostart entry for xscreensaver here. Then check the
xscreensaver.desktopfile that created and make sure it looks like this:[Desktop Entry] Comment[en_US]= Comment= Exec=xscreensaver --no-splash GenericName[en_US]= GenericName= Icon=xscreensaver MimeType= Name[en_US]=XScreenSaver Name=XScreenSaver Path= StartupNotify=true Terminal=false TerminalOptions= Type=Application X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false X-KDE-Username= X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=xscreensaverAs long as this is set to autostart, you will have a working xscreensaver in Kubuntu, if nothing else. I cannot confirm it working on any other systems and you absolutely do need both X11 and Wayland as sign in options for this to work. If you want to change settings you will have to switch back to X11 or I use scripts to edit the
.xscreensaverconfiguration file.For example I wrote two small python scripts for changing the length of time before the screen saver activates, and use cron to run them in the morning and evening. This is the one for the morning:
import os import sys import fileinput # Read in the file with open('.xscreensaver', 'r') as file: filedata = file.read() # Replace the target string filedata = filedata.replace('timeout: 0:05:00', 'timeout: 1:00:00') # Write the file out again with open('.xscreensaver', 'w') as file: file.write(filedata)The morning script changes the timeout to five minutes, and the evening script changes is to an hour, making it a simple find and replace a string for both since we’re just rotating numbers.
and this is what it would look like in your crontab:
0 7 * * * python3 /home/yourusername/screensavermorning.py - Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish3 days
Full screensaver functionality is tough on Wayland, if not impossible right now. They apparently don’t know how to have fun over there.
That said, it’s worth noting that you can install dosbox, fire up win3.11 on it, and then run your nostalgic screensavers full screen from there. Afterdark and whatnot. Dosbox keeps the computer alive so the screen saver runs forever and the computer doesn’t lock - so it’s not really full functionality. But if you’re just looking for some fun - that works great. (I do love my flying toasters)
- 3 days
Might be able to with a quickshell. Some of them have idle timeout plugins then just start mpv or terminal pipes in full screen.
Welcome to using Wayland, where no one cares what you want and it’s out of scope and actually you’re out of line for wanting it, get with the times!
You can graft xscreensaver in but the extent to which it will work is wholly dependent on your environment. Wayland provides the protocols, not implementations, so you may be running something that surfaces hooks for making xscreensaver work and you may not.
Lest this just be about showing pretty pictures, there have been numerous times when some desktop environment has decided to staple the pretty pictures part of xscreensaver on to its own locker (most famously to get matching window decorations when the computer asks for a password) and ended up with very funny bugs (most famously the “smash keyboard to bypass lock”).
- Zamundaaa@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish3 days
What do you mean? Screen savers have been possible for many, many years…
Until they fix being able to use screensavers -XScreenSaver at the very least- on Wayland, we’ll never have the “Year of Linux on the desktop".
Yes, screensavers are for sure among the top 300 features needed for this.
- 3 days
My solution was to set up xscreensaver how I wanted it in X11 and then start it via CLI as a background app on system startup for wayland.
You can’t manage screensaver settings from wayland, but you can force it into working.
I’m on Kubuntu 24.04
