Merging mate-screensaver into mate-power-manager?

[orschiro]

Dear all,

We had a discussion here on the Ubuntu MATE forum.

We discussed that screen saving and power management are very related topics and perhaps screen saving could become an extensional part of the mate-power-manager.

To quote user 1Q7FE6zp:

Feel free to do so. My suggestion would be to simply roll mate-screensaver into mate-power-manager. Power manager being the broader scope application. Screensaving could simply be perceived as an extension of power saving. Especially since the nature of screensavers has gone from actually saving your screen.

Screens these days do not actually need screensavers. It's more of a power management function than anything, in this day and age.

What are your thoughts?

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[elypter]

its part of a bigger issue. some configurations belong to each other depending on context. sometimes you want them grouped differently and sometimes not grouped at all. microsoft made this a central aspact of their system control on the jump from XP to Vista and added hyperlinks and merged/splitted dialogs. i think they overdid it and the ui is not consistent and inefficient but they tackled the problem. the way mate could solve this is mybe by using tabs and allowing to launch windows with a custom set of tabs grouped together. i have seen this in other interfaces before and i think its the most direct way to do. however maybe add icons in the tabbar for quick reidentification of certain setting tabs. i dont know if mate is flexible enought o do such a thing easily but i think it would be worth implementing anyway if it isnt possible yet.

[raveit65]

There are DE's like xfce which can use mate-screensaver but have their own power-manager. And i know about some xfce user which use mate-screensaver.

[raveit65]

i dont know if mate is flexible enought o do such a thing easily but i think it would be worth implementing anyway if it isnt possible yet.

I don't know if we have the manpower to do that :-) Volunteers welcome :-)

[Cyrille37]

I think they are not same tools, and don't think it's a goot idea to merge those two different features. The power management manage the physical display as the screen saver only consume power to decorate/animate a logical screen ;-). For my laptops i never use the screensaver but only the power management to switch off the display.

[lukefromdc]

Also, mate-screensaver when built from source can require distro specific patches to show the login dialog due to differences in PAM configuration

[vkareh]

Screen savers also offer a visible way of knowing that your computer is locked (assuming you configure it as such). I know that if I see my screen saver, CVEs notwithstanding, my computer is locked. This is definitely separate from power management.