Just getting around to figuring out why screensavers stopped working on
my F22 and found this thread which has all the info I needed (thanks
Glenn Holmer for the xscreensaver cheatsheet). I wanted to correct this
piece of misinformation, for the archive:
On 04/14/15 16:28, Lukáš Tinkl wrote:
There's a good reason why they're gone mainly because... well
they
aren't really saving anything. Back in the days when everybody had TFT
monitors, screensavers would actually prevent the physical damage from
literally burning a still image into the monitor's matrix. These days
with the LCD displays, they are doing exactly the opposite
My secondary display is an LG L246WP - 1920x1280 MVA panel (not too
shabby) and it definitely burns if I forget to turn off the displays or
a screensaver isn't running. I'll come in the next day to find emacs
chrome burned into the screen (or the default KDE locker after I found
that). :/ My primary (IPS) panel doesn't seem to suffer from this effect.
The good news is that vigorously exercising the LCD elements through all
RGB states makes them respond again - the xscreensaver 'flurry' OpenGL
screensaver does a great job of this - I can have the screen back to
normal in about three hours. Not my idea - the use of flurry for this
purpose was written up elsewhere. It was non-trivial to this
information, though - many users might assume permanent hardware damage,
especially if they can remember real phosphor burn from back in the day.
I'm not sure how the chemistry works, but I am sure that screensavers
aren't obsolete on LCD panels, nor should they be considered
merely-aesthetic functionality in KDE. If DPMS signalling were reliable
under Linux the story might be different, but we've been waiting a
couple decades for that to happen and it's still not the situation we
have available to us.
-Bill
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