Re: gnome-screensaver in CVS

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 17:13:55 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
> It is an interesting problem.  The daemon supports it.  You can turn it 
> on via gconf for now.  However, I'm not really convinced it is necessary 
> to expose this in the capplet.  I think the option really says more 
> about the quality of most screensaver themes than it does to solve any 
> real world problems.  We have all become used to it being there.

Oh, I don't think so really. It's more that people like to see new things
every so often. It's true that there an awful lot of xscreensaver hacks,
many of which are perhaps rather samey and old-school. But the randomise
option isn't there to work around that: it randomises within the set you
enable. It's just so you can come back and see something different on your
screen.

> Here's another way I've thought about it.  As far as I know, we don't
> offer an option to randomize the desktop backgrounds while we are
> sitting at the screen.

I don't think there's any fundamental reason why it doesn't exist, at
least I'd hope there isn't. The whole reason the background UI has
thumbnails and lets you add/remove images is because people *do* like to
change their wallpapers regularly. 

Things like wallpapers, screensavers and themes are how people personalise
their computers. They aren't preferences so the usual reasoning of
combinatorial complexity applied to GUI options doesn't apply. I'd really
love a randomise option for desktop backgrounds too, because when you see
the same picture or hack day after day it does get boring. Why do you
think so many websites on the net are devoted to screensavers and
wallpapers?

thanks -mike