This has been outstanding since 2005, it's clearly not going to be fixed by the gnome-screensaver maintainter(s), which either means no-one cares enough to submit patches or the patches are consistently rejected.
If the former, I'm guessing it's 'cos everyone's going back to xscreensaver, which is what I plan to do if I can't get something better working. I'm a longterm (since the early 90s) Linux user, but new to Ubuntu, appalled by how much configurability Gnome's window manager UI has lost since I last used it yonks ago. It was bad enough then to send me scurrying away to Enlightenment, though I still used the GTK and a lot of Gnome widgetry. I *really* don't see why gnome-screensaver, and various other gnome frontend things, can't have a "more configurable" mode or a "simple" mode, selectable at people's discretion. One of the posts on the gnome-screensaver bug list discussion cited above makes a very eloquent case against the "less is more" gnome philosophy, in that people learning a new UI like to play with appearance settings as part of their familiarization with the UI and to satisfy a need to mark out "personal space". People don't install and run Linux distributions to "be like everyone else". Heck: even Windows users don't like to "be like everyone else", but prefer to customize their environment; Apple users like to customize their environment; users of mobile phones, for goodness sake, prefer to be able to customize their environment. Despite the huge contributions made by the Gnome team, people get awfully pissy when stuff is "taken away". I thought this was something we'd all learned time and again in various environments. Like, for Apple OSX - which I also use - when Apple decided that Quicktime users were going to have to pay extra for full-screen mode, everyone went and downloaded VLC until Apple relented and put it back. Like for Windows... all that DRM rubbish in Vista, people went back to XP or got Linux... For all the reasons cited above in this discssion and elsewhere, while I agree 100% that custom setup should never be a *requirement* for a screen saver, and in many cases it can be undesirable if it's avoidable, nonetheless, flexibility demands that customization be *possible* for those screen savers which benefit from it. For the language-related aspects, e.g. the name of the folder in which to find pictures for a slideshow, perhaps this should be detected by the screensaver or configured when the screensaver is added (oh, except there's no GUI facility to add or delete screensavers. Ho hum.) People clearly prefer to have a "settings" button. Some people clearly *need* to have a settings button. Omitting it is, well, puzzling. I've yet to read anything from anyone angrily complaining that they don't like the "settings" button in xscreensaver, and demanding that someone remove it. Ditto, the Apple OSX and Windows forums are curiously devoid of complaints about too much facility to customize - mebbe lock- down minded IT dept managers in banks and so on complain about these things, but presumably only on locked-down private forums to which I have no access. While I'm at it, a related bug is the absence of a checkbox list of candidate screensavers for the "random" screensaver. "random" appears in the list as a screensaver and should be configurable as described below, IMO. I can see that providing a GUI to configure all the various random screensavers is going to be (a) a pain and (b) wrong-headed. So how about suggesting that screensavers provide a standard "capabilities query" switch and/or a companion settings GUI program, and then have gnome-screensaver provide a "settings" button only for those which offer a settings mode? Screensavers which need or want no settings to be set, needn't bother providing a facility to set them. All a settings button needs to do is launch the screensaver itself with a setup switch (if supported), or its companion "settings helper program" (if provided) in a separate window and then wait for it to exit. In terms of coding overhead for gnome-screensaver, this should be trivial. The responsibility for the actual setup GUI then passes to the author/maintainer of the relevant screensaver, who has an interest in bothering to write it. This would be very flexible and reasonably elegant. It would re-instate functionality which people clearly want and it would involve no significant maintenance overhead for the gnome-screensaver maintainer(s). I'm willing to write and submit patches to provide a generic "settings" button/interface for the gnome-screensaver, if anyone's interested? If the gnome devs are sufficiently aligned against user configurability, I'm even willing to make such a button predicated not only upon the presence of a suitable "setup" facility for each screensaver, but on some global configuration switch (like "GnomePurity=false", perhaps... ) which you have to edit a config file to set, so that only the elite hax0rs who can operate a text editor can get at the "evil" settings facility. I don't mind configurability being a layer down, but I do think stuff which is pure visual eye-candy needs to be GUI-configurable. I haven't looked at the gnome-screensaver source yet so I don't know if I'm willing also to hack the "random" feature. To my mind, elegance and consistency demand that "random" be a separate dispatcher program which conforms to the generic screensaver API, but I suspect it isn't. It's NOT a question of "not essential". Transparent terminal backgrounds, animated window reveals, smooth scrolling, drop shadows, NONE of these are essential. Taking the "less is more" philosophy to its logical conclusion, we already have the perfect window manager in twm or xwm. We could all use text terminals with "screen", or just plain text terminals. No un-necessary fluff or configuration at all. -- no 'Settings' button in gnome-screensaver https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/22007 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is a direct subscriber. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
