Plasma 5 - Where have all the screensavers gone

[Bill McGonigle]

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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