Wayland does not support screen savers: it does not have any provision that allows screen savers to even exist in any meaningful way. If you value screen savers, that’s kind of a problem.

Adding screen savers to Wayland is not simply a matter of “port the XScreenSaver daemon”, because under the Wayland model, screen blanking and locking should not be a third-party user-space app; much of the logic must be embedded into the display manager itself. This is a good thing! It is a better model than what we have under X11.

But that means that accomplishing that task means not just writing code, but engaging with whatever passes for a standards body or design committee in the Wayland world, and that is… how shall I put this… not something that I personally feel highly motivated to do.

  • Chewy
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    1 year ago

    There’s already a wayland protocols extension in “testing”, called ext-session-lock-v1 [1]. Sway, river and other wlroots compositors already support it.

    The ext-session-lock-v1 protocol is significantly more robust than previous client-side Wayland screen locking approaches. Importantly, the screenlocker crashing does not cause the session to be unlocked. [2]

    [1] https://wayland.app/protocols/ext-session-lock-v1

    [2] https://github.com/ifreund/waylock