some thoughts on screensavers in Plasma Workspaces 2

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi ..

side note 1: i've taken to refering to "future releases of Plasma Worskpaces 
that will use Frameworks 5 with libplasma2, Qt 5.1+ and QtQuick2" as Plasma 
Workspaces 2 (PW2) inside my head. if anyone has a better idea, speak up 
before it becomes a commonly used term :) 

side note 2: i've added a "Plasma Workspaces 2" section on the wiki:
 
	http://community.kde.org/Plasma#Plasma_Worskpaces_2

so we can keep these topics in a findable place. when we have some consensus on 
the items below (as much as we can at this early stage), i'll record them on 
the wiki so we don't lose our findings.

so ... some proposals for the lockscreen when the workspaces codebase moves to 
Frameworks 5[1]:

a) drop xscreensaver support altogether. 

it will mean one less code path to test in the locker and one less full screen 
window to deal with. it will also simplify the config UI considerably.

at that point we'll have full openGL via QtQuick2 so animated screen lockers 
can be implemented without any serious limit. 

PW2 is a good time to make such changes as it's a "major release bump". it 
would, however be nice to have 1-2 such lockers done in time for the release 
so it isn't just a loss of a feature to the user's mind, but they have 
something new to play with.

this would probably mean providing a way for lock screens to provide a config 
UI. this should be doable using QML included in the same package. we'll have 
desktop components at this point, so there is nothing to object to about using 
QML; the same will happen with plasmoids as well, i'm sure.

b) the default unlock dialog UI is put into a QML component, so that other QML 
lockers that wish to provide the same unlock UI but something different in 
behind it can do so easily. the "simple" unlocker then becomes a wallpaper 
that uses this component

c) the current implementation of Widgets-on-screensaver is dropped completely. 
it woudl be replaced with a QML containment that also loads the unlock UI. 
this could in theory even be provided as a QML component itself so other 
unlockers could have widgets. this path means lockers will need to advertise 
whether or not they support widgets (default should probably be "yes" in such 
a case)

something else we'll run into:

the unlock greeter needs to be ported to QML properly. right now and 
GreeterItem and KeyboardItem use QGraphicsProxyWidgets and this will break in 
QML2 w/scenegraph. that means kxkb needs to provide a proper QML component and 
the kgreet plugins in libs/kdm/ will need to turned into QML bits. the 
complication there is that kdm uses them as well ... so maybe some library 
duplication there, or .. we look at alternatives to kdm.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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