XScreensaver 6.0 inconvenience

[lockie]

Hello. After xscreensaver 6.0 came to portage, it was quite irritating to use it for a couple of usability reasons:
1. In previous 5.xx version, the very first key you typed was considered the first letter of a password, so you could've just come up to your computer, type the password and start doing your stuff. Not in 6.0, no sir. In 6.0 the first keystroke just makes the ridiculously large password window to pop up, so first you have to press any key or move the mouse, and only afterwards you can start typing your password.
2. If you typed the password wrong, hitting and holding backspace key does... nothing. The last character gets removed, and then autorepeat is not working as it should in X11 apps.

Those two factors combined brutally break finger automatism developed by more than a decade of using XScreensaver. I've tried masking 6.0 version, but then 5.xx was removed from portage and it blocked glibc libcrypt update, so I had to install 6.0 version. Does anyone suffer from these problems? Is there some workaround, perhaps the patch of sorts, that at least makes XScreensaver consider all typed keys to be password? Perhaps one can ask to return the old but gold 5.x version to portage?

[dbtx]

This post was mostly composed months ago for the 'software you avoid' thread... I had the same complaint as your #1 after trying 6.00 before it was in the tree, and then already masking it, before 5.45 went away. I had already wholesale-copied x11-misc/xscreensaver into /usr/local/portage for testing 6.00. But I did that by renaming the 5.45 ebuild and there were newer revisions anyway, so I needed to run some things like

[figueroa]

A few days after the update to xscreensaver, I ripped it out (depclean) and installed slock for the rare cases when I feel the need to lock the screen. With modern monitors and power controls, few people really need a screen saver, and for those who need timed screen locking, there are abundant non-fancy alternatives. My use case is home with trusted family around so I really needed xscreensaver like I needed a hole in the head. xscreensaver had become a bad habit.
_________________
Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[lockie]

Thanks for the input, dbtx and figueroa.
I guess I'm going to have to migrate to some other software (i3lock looks promising). RIP XScreensaver.

[Tony0945]

[dbtx]

[figueroa]

I'm resurrecting this thread to let other users know about xfce4-screensaver. It's a low dependency port of the mate screensaver and appears to work well under OpenBox, so probably also most other WMs and DEs. I'm starting it with a line in ~/.config/openbox/autostart as shown below:

[dbtx]

I decided to not mess around inside slock, but I emerged xprintidle and wrote a script. It runs as 'screenlockloop' in ~/.xprofile and as 'screenlock' on Ctrl+Alt+Del. It's kind of flimsy/janky/smelly but for half a year it has been mostly good enough

[figueroa]

I used xautolock with slock to provide an effective and automatic scree locking. This was the line in ~/.config/openbox/autostart that I was using:

[Juippisi]

If you have a patch you'd like to get applied gentoo-wide please make a github pull request adding it to the ebuild and our git tree. Since xscreensaver is maintainer-needed no one will get the bug mail, but the proxy-maint team will look after pull requests made against maintainer-needed packages.

[figueroa]

[Hu]

Could you provide a citation for that, and describe which forks other distributions are pursuing? Readers here might find that useful if they don't like any of the alternatives described in this thread.

[figueroa]

[Hu]

Thank you. That rundown may benefit silent readers who want to try out alternatives.

[dbtx]

I can't see that this was already posted on this forum but it was mentioned recently, 6 years later: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=819703