KDE SC 4.8 May Move Screensaver To The Compositor

Written by Michael Larabel in KDE on 10 April 2011 at 10:57 AM EDT. 4 Comments
KDE
Just a few days ago Martin Gräßlin, the lead developer of KDE's KWin compositing window manager, wrote about the KDE view on GNOME 3.0's Mutter (their new compositing window manager). Martin has now provided some more insight, but this time it's back in the KDE world. He has shared his plans to merge the KDE screensaver with the KWin compositor for the KDE SC 4.8 time-frame.

With screensavers these days being used more often to just lock the display when away from the computer or to show off interesting visuals around the office, the screensaver implementation for X right now is quite bad. In fact, we just talked at length about it last week.

The plans for the Wayland Display Server are to merge the screensaver with the Wayland compositor, so that the display can be properly locked and there's no chance of any of the screen's contents being painted atop the screensaver, as can currently happen with X. Martin's plans for KDE SC 4.8 are along the same lines with moving the screensaver into KWin so that the compositor has full control over it for ensuring the screensaver is properly displayed and nothing else.

This though will require some work, so it's a target for KDE SC 4.8 and not the next KDE SC 4.7 release. It will also require proper handling in cases where compositing is not supported or enabled and integration with certain Plasma features.

Read more about the plans on Martin's blog.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week