Huh, it turns out #gnome has a dismissiveness problem on their forums whenever users explain their use cases.
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@risottobias @gnomelibre but, really, why do you need "other locations"? if you access root so often, why not to add a shortcut to sidebar?
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@VBB @gnomelibre because it's already there by default?
also... it's annoying to be a reply guy.
and it's not root that I'm frequently accessing.
it's other things that are infrequent enough to be annoying.
like if you tried really hard to hide partitioning or specific folders from users (e.g., that's a scumbag windows/mac move)
I think both of you kinda don't get the point that you're reinforcing why gnome is pretty awful. the people.
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@VBB @gnomelibre it's not power users you'd need to explain this to.
it's every single confused user who doesn't know how to read release notes, or doesn't even know their OS decided to update gnome.
it's confused grandmas and newbie to medium users.
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@risottobias I agree with you. All I really want is a simple way to display an image (NOT put my computer to sleep pr into hibernation) if there is no activity for two or three minutes, until I touch a key or move the mouse. But it has to continue to send a signal to my display during that period, hence the desire to display an image. In researching this I discovered that this is called a "screensaver" and the #Gnome developers don't like them for some reason, so when you ask about such a thing you get told to just turn off the display using its power button (which is NOT the functionality I am seeking). I HATE being told I don't need what I asked for, and that I should just use some inferior solution.
If #PopOS and the #Cosmic desktop are half as good as they are aiming for whenever they finally make an actual release, I am switching over and the Gnome developers and their precious DE can rot as far as I am concerned.
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When you say it "has to" keep sending an image to your displays, is that a requirement you're imposing? If so then yeah you want something like a screensaver but for a static image. Otherwise, you can configure GNOME to "blank" your screen which will black it out and turn it off. This doesn't put the system to sleep.
Screensavers existed to prevent burn-in on CRTs. They were not considered when designing GNOME's modern architecture so now they're non-trivial to reimplement
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@AdrianVovk @risottobias I say it has to keep sending an image to the display because if it doesn't, the display complains that there is no HDMI input. If the screen would truly stay black it would not be a problem, although I can see the value in being notified if a HDMI cable becomes disconnected or something like that happens.
This is why I have tried to frame my request as a desire to display an image during a period of inactivity, rather than simply asking for a screensaver. The fact is I have been trying to find an answer to this for a while, and I have read several comments from other people who have been disappointed (or even in a few cases angry) that screensavers were removed from Gnome/Wayland. If Ubuntu were still running X (or X11 or Xorg or whatever the proper name is) then there apparently are utilities you can use to make a screensaver, but they don't work in #Wayland and therefore not in modern versions of #Ubuntu (or most other modern #Linux distros).
The funny/sad thing is that in trying to find an answer I have read a lot of people who said the switched from #Gnome to #KDE just because of issues like this. Apparently people are getting sick of the "my way or the highway" mentality of the Gnome developers, and that is also one of the big reasons there is so much interest in the #Cosmic desktop. People like the idea of Cosmic in part because they don't try to make it look like Windows, and more importantly, it's not Gnome. I suspect that Ubuntu and Gnome are both dragging each other down by making choices that are increasingly unpopular with users. I have no idea if the Cosmic desktop will give you a way to have "screensaver" functionality but that's not the point, the point is that the Gnome project is taking away a lot of the "freedom" that some #Linux users so value.
Now please keep in mind that I am saying the above because of comments I have read while trying to find a solution for my issue. I will also note that in my opinion certain Gnome-related online communities seem rather toxic, and if that's not just my imagination then that's not helping them either. In my opinion the only thing that stops KDE (or #Cinnamon for that matter) from perhaps being THE preferred desktop environment for the majority of Linux distros is that they insist on trying to make it look too much like Windows, and in KDE's case it still has a few too many unresolved bugs (although not everyone seems to encounter those, which makes me think KDE has better support for certain kinds of hardware than others).
As an aside, I also get the appeal of switching to Wayland, but at the same time there are a lot of X/X11/Xorg related utilities that still need to be ported over, at least from what I have been reading. However I get the impressing that the lack of "screensavers" is not a Wayland limitation per se, because KDE still has them apparently. So the blame for that lies squarely on the shoulders of the Gnome developers, who (from what I have read) don't seem to much care what anyone outside their small group might want or need. I am just a user, I don't follow Gnome politics, but as I said I have read many comments where the Gnome developers were not exactly held in high regard. This is not to say Gnome is bad, it has a lot of things going for it, but being responsive to users' needs doesn't appear to be one of those things.
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@maple @risottobias It should stay black. GNOME sends a black picture to the monitor, then tells it to turn off, then stops sending an image. Then when you jiggle your mouse it sends a new image and tells the monitor to power back on. It's called DPMS - maybe it's just broken on your monitor(s). GNOME also puts a lock screen on screen when doing this, so if the monitor turns back on it shows a blurred version of your wallpaper and clock.
Turn off suspend and turn on lock/blank in Settings>Power
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@AdrianVovk @risottobias I get SO tired of having to explain this over and over again, but if you "tell the monitor to turn off" and then stop sending an image, some displays (including mine) apparently don't understand the command to turn off, and then when it "stops sending an image" it interprets that as a failure that it needs to notify the user about, which a big notice on the display that the signal has been lost or words to that effect.
Many people use repurposed small TV sets as displays because (in some parts of the world at least) they are significantly less expensive and more readily available than "computer monitors". TV's are built with the assumption that if you switch to an HDMI input there will be something there sending a HDMI signal, but maybe you forgot to turn that device on, so it notifies you with a big box informing you it's not getting a signal. I hope you are not going to say that the Gnome developers never anticipated that anyone would ever use a small TV as a display!
Also I don't want or need a lock screen, and don't want my wallpaper (blurred or not) and clock displayed, I want to be able to select the image that appears.
As for your ideas about screensavers, the thing I would like to know is this. Apparently Gnome has some built-in mechanism to detect when the keyboard or mouse have not been used in a while, otherwise the power management setting that lets you black the screen after a period of inactivity would not work. Is that information about recent activity of the mouse and keyboard available in any other way, that might be accessed by a script of some kind (for example in a bash script)? Because if that information could be accessed, in theory you could start some kind of program that would display an image (or even play a video) fullscreen, then when activity resumes you could just kill that process (that is displaying the image or playing the video). I am not a programmer but it doesn't seem like that would be a complicated script to create IF the information about keyboard and mouse activity is available through some mechanism.
As for the Gnome philosophy, that's a double-edged sword. It's probably a big part of why Gnome seems more stable than KDE (at least on some hardware) but at the same time absolutely NO ONE likes it when a feature they have come to rely on just disappears because the developers have decided it's not well maintained enough for their tastes. This is one of the big reasons some users are fleeing MacOS - every time Apple releases a new version of MacOS, things that used to work just great stop working. MacOS has been in a slow decline for at least a decade now and many Apple desktop users are starting to wonder why they are paying exorbitant prices for Apple hardware, just to get software that is less and less capable with each new iteration. I really hope Gnome is not falling into that trap. If code is ancient but still works fine and causes no problems, it should not be arbitrarily removed, that is exactly the sort of thing that infuriates users. Knowing that would make me LESS likely to choose a Gnome-based distro the next time I upgrade.
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@maple @risottobias Maybe then GNOME can keep sending an image after the power off command. That's a question for graphics people, not me...
Re activity tracking: yes it's exposed via the XScreensaver dbus API, IIRC. The part that's missing is for the screen saver to forcibly put itself on screen over top of all other content and consume all input. Apps can't just do that anymore like they could on X.
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@maple @risottobias Re features: stuff that gets no commits but works isn't unmaintained. It's just done.
But in practice that doesn't really happen. Because there's always something changing somewhere. It's hard for code to be "done" and "just work" forever. Code rots. Hence, it needs maintenance. If a feature is "done" but then breaks and nobody is there to fix it, that's when it's removed. This is a universal problem in software development
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@maple @risottobias Microsoft has a novel solution to it though: they just never touch anything. Code that's done is done. Instead they just make a new API, create a new stack, that runs next to the old one. Each time you need to make some breaking change you just fork, leave the old thing there unmaintained forever, and make a new API.
This is why Windows is huge, code quality is low, security is lax, and Microsoft needs an army of engineers. Open source can't afford to do this.
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@AdrianVovk @maple alternative:
keep the old UI mostly the same.
any new UI thing needs to be a fork of the old UI.
if enough people adopt the fork (e.g., gnome 3), abandon the old one (e.g., gnome 2)
that is, freeze all the design nastiness / holier-than-thou of gnome3.
if people want fancier things, they're in gnome4.
