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1. Embed this notice
   booters (booters@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 21-Dec-2023 06:05:15 JST booters

   Something funny just happened. My constant desire to procrastinate got the better of me again and I decided to download xscreensaver for ubuntu. Naturally, I decided to check out the screensavers that come prepackaged with it. One of them is called zoom and guess what happens when I decide to preview it?

   Yeah exactly you have guessed it, #xscreensaver starts the program zoom. like, like, the video conferencing software. I was utterly baffled but it seems like I am not the first person to encounter this hilarious problem (see screenshot)

   • Embed this notice
     jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 21-Dec-2023 06:05:11 JST jwz

     in reply to

     @booters
     tl;dr your distro sucks.

     I'v been PLEADING with the various packagers to stop making this unforced error in their distros for decades. They all refuse.

     I distribute XScreenSaver as a single package, tested as a unit.

     Then those bozos divide it into dozens of "extras-data-extras-gl-extras" sub-packages so that most people accidentally install part of it, yet with config files that reference the whole thing. Hilarity ensues.

     "Here's your car. Make sure you install brakes. Good luck!"

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     esmevane, sorry (ironchamber@mastodon.esmevane.com)'s status on Thursday, 21-Dec-2023 12:23:55 JST esmevane, sorry

     in reply to

     • jwz

     @jwz @booters This explains a whole lot about a whole lot, not just the screensaver issue. What in the world motivated their decision to do this?

   • Embed this notice
     esmevane, sorry (ironchamber@mastodon.esmevane.com)'s status on Friday, 22-Dec-2023 01:19:23 JST esmevane, sorry

     in reply to

     • jwz
     • Petr Tesarik

     @ptesarik @jwz @booters I’m not sure that screensavers are getting deliberately put into containers much by that crowd, are they?

   • Embed this notice
     Petr Tesarik (ptesarik@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 22-Dec-2023 01:19:27 JST Petr Tesarik

     in reply to

     • jwz
     • esmevane, sorry

     @jwz @ironchamber @booters This all sounds hilarious, until you realize that some people try extremely hard to reduce their installed image size to an absolute minimum (like dozens of megs), because hundreds of instances should run on a single machine.

     Maybe the real mistake was containers?

   • Embed this notice
     jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 22-Dec-2023 01:19:28 JST jwz

     in reply to

     • esmevane, sorry

     @ironchamber @booters
     You'd have to ask them that.

     Back in, say, 1996, it might have been reasonable for someone to say, "I would like to install XScreenSaver without requiring OpenGL, because my video card can't do that." But we have made some advances since then.

     For example, in 2002, HDMI was invented.