> Do people still run screensavers? That's pretty irresponsible.
> The monitor should be turned off, and most of the box too.
I don't run a screen saver on any machine to 'save the screen' or 'provide pretty pictures when I'm not there'.
On Windows, my screen saver starts up (blank) at the same time as the system is set to shut off the monitor. Attempting to wake up the system after this time results in being presented with the lock screen, which runs in a different desktop context than the desktop itself. I'll suspend the system if I'm going to be away for more than a couple minutes and don't have anything running that'll be aversely affected by being paused (i.e. no active network operations).
On OSX, the situation is largely the same. Lock screen presented upon resume, and set to suspend very aggressively (a suspend/resume cycle is incredibly short).
On Linux, I only use hibernate, because suspend still isn't reliable for me... unfortunately, this takes upwards of 10 minutes to shut the machine down. When it comes back up, it has the screen saver running as a lock screen, to require the user to enter a password before they can actually use the machine. I really hate using the screen saver as the screen "lock", it's very sluggish to start and even worse to bring up the password box (if it's been idle for at least a few minutes, /10 seconds/ to show the box isn't unusual). It's also hard to tell when the resume has finished with the blank screen saver (I can't tell if it's showing the screen saver or if it's still resuming), so I might end up having to actually install and use a screen saver that actually shows something. Certainly the worst of the three for me.
Posted Jan 20, 2012 1:14 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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On Linux, I only use hibernate, because suspend still isn't reliable for me... unfortunately, this takes upwards of 10 minutes to shut the machine down
That sounds like a bug. When you say 'hibernate', do you mean the hibernate script that is part of TuxOnIce? If so, you might want to mention it on one of the tuxonice lists, and see if there's anything that can be done to speed things up. My 12Gb two-disk machine takes under a minute to suspend.
X.org screensaver bypass found
Posted Jan 20, 2012 2:05 UTC (Fri) by Kit (guest, #55925)
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I don't believe I'm using TuxOnIce, it doesn't appear that's what Fedora uses based on a quick search. It spends the time on preallocating space for the image (the exact wording is slightly different)... it would be nice if it at least had some sort of progress indicator. The part where it's actually dumping the memory to disk doesn't take close to as long.
X.org screensaver bypass found
Posted Jan 23, 2012 10:07 UTC (Mon) by sebas (subscriber, #51660)
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That's actually two issues TuxOnIce solved quite nicely: smarter and faster preparation of the hibernate process, and showing progress while doing it (and also being able to cancel it while it's hibernating).
I haven't tried it in a while though. It used to be very reliable for me, but nowadays, I'm just using S3.