Screen Locking for 4.10

Aleix Pol aleixpol at kde.org
Thu Oct 4 15:20:40 UTC 2012


Hi!
I've been trying to make sense out of the new screen locker and I'm
not sure the whole system is ready for release yet. So I'd like to
discuss a little about it and see what can we do to push it forward.

By default, since the new branch was merged, I'm getting a white
screen (that feels a bit aggressive), so I decided to go to the KCM
and see what can can I do to stop this. Let me discuss my experience:

- In System Settings, it was listed under "Display and Monitor". Maybe
it made sense for the screen savers, but when you _lock_ you don't do
it for the screen, you're also locking all input so it's more of a
different thing. (I know, we're not going to solve the system settings
here)

Then we are in the KCM, we have 2 types of options: locking and screen
saver types.
Let me put a screenshot of what I see:
http://wstaw.org/m/2012/10/04/plasma-desktopZfl805.png

- We can set an option to "Start Automatically after x seconds". I
have a feeling that tells me that this should depend on the Power
Settings Plasmoid but then again the wording would be terribly weird.
In any case we don't want to get our screen locked from the
"Presentation" activity.

About the screen locker types:

- We have a big interface with most things disabled by default. It
made me excited in the beginning then it all disappeared fast.
- We have a "Simple Locker". What does that mean? Why can't I test it?
- Then we have Screen Savers where I have Random and just Black Screen
(I think Black is simple enough...). Do we have other "Screen Savers"?

There's also the "Desktop Widgets" option. There, I think a nicer name
would be "Interactive Locker". It sounded appealing to me but then:
- For some reason I changed something that plasma didn't like, so now
every time the overlay is called I get a crash. This means that if I
lock my computer, then I get a black screen that I can't get back
from.

And in general, I understand that it's a locking screen, but I'd like
to see it being able to have different unlocking systems rather than
the password, have we considered that?

Aleix

PS: note that we have 1 month tops to fix this!


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