@lw64 I've been asked to not share details publicly to avoid accidental miscommunication to distros. I've got a conflict-of-interest, so until the Foundation green lights my ideas I'll keep them to myself. Hope that's understandable.
The main point is that we're aware of the possibile discomfort a GNOME OS may bring to distros and are looking for ways to deal with that. Once there's a plan that the Foundation deems good enough to share with distros for feedback, I'm sure it will.
Time to make it official! I want to turn #GNOME OS, GNOME's home-grown distro for testing and development of the GNOME Desktop, into a real production-ready general purpose OS. I finally blogged about it: https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2024/10/25/a-desktop-for-all/
@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.
@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
@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.
@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
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
