Removing disable idle system screenlock as default behaviour for Plasma 5

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Sun Apr 26 10:28:05 UTC 2015


On Sun, 2015-04-26 at 04:30 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Germano Massullo wrote:
> > KDE Plasma 5 locks the screen with user password after 5 minutes of
> > system being in idle.
> > I think that we should disable screenlock as default behaviour for KDE
> > Plasma, because it will annoy many users. If anybody needs it, it can be
> > easly activated.
> 
> +1. Sorry Lukáš and Rex, but we should really override the upstream default 
> and revert to the Plasma 4 default here.
> 
> Automatically locking the screen after n minutes of inactivity is inherently 
> flawed and insecure, because it gives an attacker n minutes of time to take 
> over your desktop. There is NO alternative to locking your screen manually 
> when leaving your desktop. Therefore, supporting automatic locking sends the 
> entirely wrong message. (It lets users get away with laziness, until they 
> get burned by it.)
> 
> And then there is the annoyance factor already mentioned by other posters. 
> And the added exceptions for things like video players just make it MORE 
> likely that the automatic locking the user was relying on will not happen 
> (e.g., because of an embedded video in some web page in the background).

I entirely agree.

> The message should be: If you want the screen to be locked, then lock it. It 
> only takes 2 clicks.

Or close the lid if it's a laptop (which seems to be the use case most
people are concerned about).

Slightly OT: video players can prevent locking, but can they prevent the
screen going dark? This happens to me all the time when watching a long
video.

poc



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