Screen Locking for 4.10

[Aleix Pol]

On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 6:17 PM, Marco Martin <notmart at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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Oh, I'm sorry if this sounded like a rant. I didn't expect this to
drive us into a bike-shedding position. I just knew it sat in a branch
for a while and I wanted to know if there were reasons behind this or
it was just legacy.

>From my PoV I think that we should make sure that the plasma overlay
is enough in this case. I didn't know that it was decided to let
xscreensavers to stay so I guess it's normal that we need an option
box with the old and new for a while.

About my crash, could somebody point me to how is the overlay run? I
think it's due to some problem with the wallpapers but i'm not all
that sure. Once that's fixed, I'd like to propose a new design for
this KCM.

Thanks!
Aleix