wallpapers on lock screen

[Eike Hein]

On 13.10.2014 22:50, ctoennies at interstel.de wrote:
> Why not simply have the checkbox "use default wallpaper" in the
> lockscreen kcm?
> Unchecked, it would allow for picking a background yourself.

I think we're kind of, of sort of discussing three different
things at the same time:

a) The ability to have the user's current desktop background
in the lock screen.

Notes on that:
- If it's supposed to be generic (i.e. works with all wallpaper
   type plugins), it's difficult to establish sync.
- Dumping the actually rendered wallpaper into a file and
   showing it in the lock screen could be one way to go, but
   hard because of display hotplug.
- Dumping also means no animated wallpapers on the lock screen.
- If instead we only want to support it for Image wallpapers,
   the config logically has to be part of that plugin, otherwise
   things get messy (e.g. if the option to use the wallpaper is
   in the lock screen config, it makes no sense if the wallpaper
   plugin isn't Image - so you'd have to read configs across
   products to make it conditional, and the user would have low
   insight into what's going on).

b) Whether doing 'a' *by default* is a good idea or not.

Notes on that:
- Thumbs down from me for the privacy/securty angle.
- Blurring the wallpaper heavily mitigates this to some
   degree. It still makes my spider sense tingle, but I
   could maybe sleep at night. :P

c) The option to set a custom wallpaper for the lock screen.

This is in some sense entirely independent of the above. I
think we want to allow this in principle; the difficulty is
in UI design - if 'a' requires us to stick a "Also use on
lock screen" into the Image plugin's wallpaper config it
fighrs with a wallpaper picker in the Lock Screen KCM, and
there's also the issue of having the former in the wall-
paper config in cases where the lock screen design from the
look and feel package doesn't care about backgrounds.

Further, wallpapers are per-activity, ...

This is one of these situations where suporting all the
different features we have in concert ends up being diffi-
cult. There's some radical solutions:

- Give up on 'a' and 'b' entirely and just do 'c'.
- Throw out all wallpaper plugins except Image.

This is why $competitor sometimes gets blamed for having
too few features, but has few features for a reason - it's
easy to lock yourself into sudoku puzzles with many features.


> Greetings, Clemens.

Cheers,
Eike