Wayland and Big Desktop Need To Get Their Shit Together.

Note: This ugly disjointed ramble has been in my "Notes to myself that I'm never going to post" queue for a couple of weeks. But JWZ has recently tried to finally engage the enemy and released XScreenSaver 6.11.

I've been running Linux with XScreenSaver since the very early days of KDEs usable existence on my daily driver machines as a senior sysadmin, network admin, tools hacker. Overall this has been the correct choice even though for several years there in the 2000s sysadminning my workstation seemed to be like 60% of my job. At the end of the day, I'm just some guy. I'm not a developer, and I'm not part of The Community of circle jerking Thought Leaders and Influencers. Just a worker bee with 30 years of workflow and tools I want to keep working. Most of my personal productivity tooling has survived migration to Wayland, but several things I rely on, such as Synergy (copy buffer sync) are major blockers. XScreenSaver is a pretty major blocker for me too.

However in their utter dismissal of tools like XScreenSaver, Big Desktop (Wayland, KDE, and I assume GNOME) are really pissing me off as a user and pushing me back off the platform. It's just emblematic of how emphasis is moving away from users being able to define their own environment to their needs and toward more control from RH et al.

I don't know why Wayland and/or DE projects don't even entertain the opinions of the developer who's been consistently locking screens on Unix for over 30 years. I don't hear Jamie even really wanting to handle locking the screen necessarily, only that there's no framework to work within the existing locking mechanisms to show hacks at lock time. XScreenSaver works (with hurdles of course since nothing can ever be painless in JWZ-world) just fine on MacOS with Apple handling the locker as far as I can tell.

It baffles me to see responses from leaders of distros that boil down to in a post-CRT world your use case is irrelevant, your machine should be asleep to save power, Consumer. Screensavers are not a RedHat approved use of electricity. So no one should play video games because it's a gluttonous waste of energy. Nevermind the fact that with modern monitors and SSDs a NUC can run for days on screensaver before you approach my power draw for 5 minutes in 2000, with my 3x 21" Trinitrons and spinning drives grinding away. Man, the heat that used to come off of all that shit. The power consumption argument is as dismissive as it gets.

Wayland and DE people talk "security", and I get that things such as KMag can't work because windows shouldn't be able to know what is being displayed by other windows. Get it. But my security profile isn't "I'm on an NSA workstation on an airgapped network". My systems are all inside my house. I habitually lock screens out of A: Good Security Practice and B: keyboard-typo-safety. If I get up to pat my cat or get a snack, I want my machine to be Hacking the Gibson when I get back in 5 minutes. I do not want my machine to sleep since I probably have 30 RDP / SSH sessions open to other hosts. If someone needs to sit at my terminal to get the Secret Missile Codes I've got bigger problems. They've probably already killed me and my cat.

Microsoft and Apple figured out how to securely let a third party display a screensaver while the OS handles locking decades ago.

It should be embarrassing to Big Desktop that XScreenSaver works better on my goddamn phone as a live background than it does on Wayland.

"What never was cannot be broken" / "Works well and as designed" -- Guy Who Isn't The Whole of the Problem.

I guess someone needs to write "Why Cooperation With Wayland is Impossible".

I can't fucking wait until ssh forwarding breaks with applications I care about. I'm sure it'll happen one day and just make my systems that little bit less useful. Remote Display / Tunneling is a Worthless Legacy Feature. You should use RDP now or VNC or whatever...