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"
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Things that make you go ๐ค. Weird computer stuff. Artist and general creative type. Occasionally funny. Gentoo on main. I play rhythm games!
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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?)
yeah i have very fond memories of admiring the screensaver on my family's old windows 7. it was real pretty.
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
The irony, of course, is that they're actually useful again now that we have OLED displays.
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
