Screen Locking for 4.10

[Marco Martin]

On Thursday 04 October 2012, Aleix Pol wrote:
> 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.

it has been in a branch for more than a year, in review for more than a month, 
concerns (and help in solving them or are not valid:p) should have been 
expressed then

but it's not too late, patches welcome
yay for bugfixes,
down with bikeshed

> 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:

should be the default wallpaper, and yes should try to find it in a bit more 
robust fashion
(/me points out that before it was a black screen, so no change here)

i would like to have only the option with widgets.
it's significantly slower to start tough, so that still needs to be solved

> - 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)

yeah, in fact is called the "screen locker", and everywhere this is used the 
action is called "lock screen", how one could think is about the screen? how 
silly
</sarcasm>

> 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?

it's the default, a test button would just basically be a button to lock the 
screen, it can be done

> - 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"?

they are all in kdeartwork in svn.
the initial idea was to kill that 90's stuff altogether, was kept by popuplar 
demand (well, at least in wayland we'll have to kill it anyways, yay)

> 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.

backtrace? probably is a crash fixed yesterday in workspace

> 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?
> 

meh, write a plugin for that.

it supports either any greeter that kdm supports or you can do you own thing 
in qml (we have a touch based one in active that doesn't ask passwords)

until then, it supports all the unlock types that were supported before

Cheers,
Marco Martin