Update available! This version is very old.
Xscreensaver has apparently been checking for updates and is disappointed that it hasn’t had one for 14 months because Debian is too stable. Can anyone recommend a linux screensaver which would work with xfce and can be trusted to never do that?
I was considering keeping xscreensaver and just blocking any network requests it makes at the firewall, but if jwz is going to be like that I guess it’s enough motivation to actually look for a replacement.
Well, if you read some more of jwz’s blog posts about the horrible security bugs that others have added while creating derivatives of Xscreensaver you might think twice before doing so. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition For me a screensaver is no longer about trying to prevent dead pixels (or something like that) but being able to safely lock the screen when being away from it for a while.
For a guy who’s gotta be at least 20 years older than me (I’m almost 40) he seems kinda naive about how the law works in the real world. Lawyer up or fuck all’s gonna change.
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Maybe ironically, the dev acutally makes a good case for why Wayland should be the future in that post. (Crashing the screen locker doesn’t cause it to display your desktop instead)
If you received constant complaints from users about bugs that you had resolved years ago, but package maintainers refused to package, you’d probably get sick of it too.
Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) has blog posts about how everyone in the world uses curl, and as a result include the curl license in their readme, which means he gets mail from people upset about their car not working.
Steam had a big thing recently because the snap of Steam is not official. But yet, they get a TON of bug reports for things that are only broken in the snap.
I imagine having the same conversation of “That bug is already fixed as of 8 months ago” “Well how do I install the latest release?” “I dunno, talk to your distro about that” on a super regular basis, it starts being something that is incredibly infuriating. No one wants to take the anger of aggressive upset people, especially when the fault lies with someone else. He has asked Debian to stop shipping out of date versions of his software in the past. But because open source, they are not obligated to, so he has very limited ways to protect his own interests.
Your issue sounds like it’s with Debian for shipping incredibly out of date software and putting jwz into this position in the first place and not with jwz.
Oh look. Debian changed the keepassxc package and now the keepassxc repo is getting all the bug reports for it. Their stance is “it will go away in a year or so”
Regardless of whether or not it is a good idea, it’s undeniable that Debian makes a lot of decisions that negatively impact their upstream. And since it’s someone else’s problem, oh well.
There is a reason upstream repo maintainers wind up angry about problems that someone else caused.
xfce4-screensaver isn’t packaged for debian stable as of yet, but I’ve built it from source with only minor hacking required to get it to run with the current version of everything else. Problem solved.