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norwegian cryptid. archaeologist. FFXIV sicko. very good at gpose. au'ra appreciater.

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lapisnev
@lapisnev

like yeah they haven't fulfilled their original purpose of allowing you to keep a CRT warmed up without burning in an image in about two decades but it annoyed me that we went from "computers are Contraptions that do Whimsical Things like dinging and playing back animated GIFs and making a whole lot of clatter to remember a few megabytes of information" to "everything with a CPU in it is a Device and it must look flat and abstract and be able to turn on and off instantly and anything fun it might do is a waste of power so by the way we pumped it full of ads and subscriptions"


eramdam
@eramdam

idk about Linux but I know Windows basically killed screensavers but macOS still has a "culture" of screensavers and it rules:

  • just last year, in macOS 14 Sonoma they introduced those "wallpaper+screensavers" combo that animate when the screen is locked and morph back into a wallpaper when you unlock. It's delightful. video
  • the next version of macOS is already goated IMO because there's a screensaver/wallpaper combo that's entirely programmatic paying an hommage to classic Mac OS source

Also also if you want more cool screensavers, the xscreensaver (Linux/macOS only) collection has some great ones, including reproduction of classic Windows screensavers Microsoft cannot be bothered to include anymore.


hkr
@hkr

what the fuck are you talking about?

The same .SCR files from After Dark circa 1991 still works on your Windows 11 machine! You can still make screen savers! Sure screensavers are off by default in windows, because again their purpose has been diminished with recent technology, but no one took anything from you. All you have to do is type "Screen Saver" into your windows start search and it pops up.


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in reply to @lapisnev's post:

that's... a good way to put it, like there was this huge push to make everything efficient and why not just shut off the screen but the other half is eating up any kind of efficiency gains with ads and chromium in application trenchcoats and nagware built into the OS so now it's like fuck, why can't we just run the pipes screensaver

(is anyone porting xscreensaver stuff to wayland shit?)

lol I wonder if MS do this to game their efficiency numbers in a very literal since they started plastering carbon offsets on half the settings options and on their website and product details.

nothing to benefit the user, very little energy saved with modern displays, but in aggregate let's you lie about co2 because idling computers aren't running the display, but modern computers are idle half the day or more

nah screensavers 'died' a slow death on Windows way before Microsoft started acting like they care about carbon emissions. the screensaver settings pane in Windows 11 still looks the same as it did in Vista

xscreensaver is a wonder. i don't use my linux lappy a whole lot so probably 98% of the time its life's purpose is to sit there and play an animation of 4d double rotations or an outside in type beat or moosay the time and date or even display fake error messages and so on. it's almost certainly not necessary for the screen at all, but it's so valuable to me (plus it pulls double duty by auto-locking the computer after a certain period of time). i've been meaning to figure out making my own ones for that thing

in reply to @eramdam's post:

As someone with a collection of hundreds of wallpaper-sized art images, I have been extremely well-served by the macOS "Photo Wall" screensaver. It's a cheap trick, but every time I think, "Oh, hey, I love that image!" it puts an ever-so-slight spring in my step.

in reply to @hkr's post:

Why do they need to care about a feature that has worked the same since 1995? Most people don't want or need a screen saver these days, it makes sense to deprioritize it in the current settings menu, but they didn't take it away.

Now tell me MacOS can run the same screen savers from OSX without needing to be converted first.

I had to dig into this because my Mac can't run anything after Ventura, but everything I was finding online sure made it look like Apple slurped out all the classic screensavers in Sonoma - I finally found a video that actually scrolls down all the way in the list though, and nah, they're down there, you can get flurry and arabesque and whatnot. Of course, they're buried under the terabyte of live wallpapers Apple is pushing, but that does come back to "this is probably what most people want."

Linux on the other hand apparently lost screensavers to Wayland, which I hadn't heard because I don't use Wayland, and this is why I don't use Wayland. Yet another casualty of the windowing system nobody asked for and which solves no known problem!

yeah i forgot to come back to this but yeah all the OSX era screensavers are still there, i think Flurry and Arabesque specifically never really left, and they kept adding screensavers over the years. 'Drift' being a great addition that's like, dating back to ~Catalina. I think Apple changed their format in that they cannot be just Quartz Compose files anymore and have to be "apps" but don't quote me on that because I might be misremembering.

considering the new UIs they keep coming up with I consider that part to be a feature, honestly

i do not believe anyone who worked on the new settings panel for anything network related has ever so much as connected to a wifi network

Leaving the feature unchanged from how it appeared in Windows 98, turning it off by default, and not packing in most of the screensavers anymore, is not active support. It's the opposite really, it's leaving the code to rot without removing it outright because it still works for now.

I wrote a bunch of .desktop files to get some xscreensaver hacks working under mate-screensaver on my Linux desktop, but there too by default you have two crappy options or else blanking the screen.

You didn’t frame it that way, you said they took them from us. They didn’t. They don’t actively update it because it’s not a thing people need anymore, but if you want it it’s still there and everything works as it did for the last 29 years. If your complaint is that Microsoft isn’t actively developing new screen savers, say that instead of framing it in some sort of user oppression bullshit.

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