screen savers that suck
Thus far, I've been pretty lenient about what submissions I've accepted into the xscreensaver collection, and I've never deleted any; but let's face it, some of them suck. Comment here telling me which ones you think are so lousy that I shouldn't even bother distributing them any more.
Tags: computers, firstperson, linux, mac, xscreensaver
Current Music: Tones on Tail -- The Never Never (Is Forever) ♬
98 Responses:
crystal, cynosure, greynetic, mismunch, munch. All hideous.
I like the mesmerizing effect of munch, personally.
Remove Munch? But it's historic.
That's why there's version control. And archives.
More to the point, I like munch
I like munch a lot. I'm always looking at it thinking how cool of a hack it is given its history. And that's the way it's pleasing to me, not only by the way it looks.
I like crystal.
Stupid screensavers, in no particular order: Antinspect, maybe Atunnel, Boing, BouncingCow, Cage, Compass, GLForestFire, Lavalite, Moebius, Providence, Twang, XFlame, XJack. ("stupid" being subjective of course.)
Screensavers that could possibly be merged into a "spinning, bouncing, animated (simple OpenGL model)" screensaver: Cubenetic, DangerBall, Engine, Flag, Gears, GLKnots, GLPlanet, GLText, Lisa, Menger, Morph3D, Sierpinski3D, Superquadrics.
Screensavers that could possibly be merged into a "spinning, non-bouncing, animated (simple OpenGL model)" screensaver: Cage, Lament, Providence, SBalls, Stairs.
There's some other groups of screensavers that do very similar things, but I'm too lazy to figure them out and list them right now. Maybe later.
Stupid screensavers, in no particular order
By some strange coincidence, they actually ended up in alphabetical order...
Prolly was reading them off the list while typing.
Yeah, I realize that. Was an (apparently failed) attempt at humour, as there definitely was a particular order, just not one that conveyed preference.
I love XJack, me. It's only a shame it's not more configurable.
it only takes a moment with a hex editor for it to say 'no beer and no tv make homer go crazy'...
*looks shocked*
Xjack is without a doubt my favorite xscreensaver (and I'm fond of lavalite, compass, bouncingcow and meobius as well).
All these screensavers are yuors, except Lament.
BouncingCow is my favorite screensaver! And who told you screensavers should be smart? ;)
Yes, BouncingCow definitely adds to the "coolness" factor of xscreensaver. Please don't remove it!
Disabled for the last infinity:
I don't much care which get hammered. Keep barcode, kumppa and sproingies and I won't complain.
Attraction, other than (balls)
Bouboule
deco
demon
greynetic
helix
hopalong
IFS
IMSmap
Intermomentary
julia
mismunch
moire
nerverot (all variants)
pedal
qix (all variants)
spiral
If any of these aren't in xscreensaver, sorry ... this is just what I've got.
A short list, mostly of things that look like they are from 1990 but not in a cool retro way. Hopefully I'm not wasting your time with hacks not actually in xscreensaver.
Attraction (lines)
Attraction (orbital)
Attraction (poly)
Attraction (splines)
Bouboule
Boxed
Braid
Bubbles
Cloudlife
Cynosure
Deco
Forest
GLForestFire
GLForestFire (rain)
Greynetic
Helix
Laser
Lightning
Lissie
Mismunch
Moire2
Munch
Noseguy
Pedal
Pyro
Qix (all)
RD-Bomb
Rorschach
Spiral
Strange
Triangle
Worm
XRaySwarm
XSpiroGraph
I second the call for somehow merging the "spinning 3D objects" hacks together.
Also, some of the above would be tolerable in a cool retro way if only they were antialiased.
And please, get rid of the My-First-OpenGL-Program GLForrestFire ones.
Rorschach is cooler if you change the colour each iteration; set the hue to 1/# of iterations. I was going to send jwz a patch, but I got busy doing paid work...
Moire is excellent. Anything that I can tolerate that makes some other people turn away from my computer in physical distress is a splendid entertainment.
Some of the posters so far are fools. BouncingCow must stay. The sight of bouncing cows gives meaning to the universe.
As for screensavers to go, I'd say Forest, Queens and Endgame (neat computational concept, but doesn't really make for a screensaver), GLForestFire (UGLY), and Deluxe.
Bouncing Cow is the only screensaver I use.
Bouncing Cow Must Stay.
I'm with the bouncing cow posse. There is nothing quite so funny as a bouncing cow. Except perhaps two bouncing cows.
Seconded (fourthed?). They even fight crime!
Don't forget the flying toasters! They also give meaning to the universe.
You're opening yourself up to a world of people flaming you for removing the most obscure thing possible.
I do however applaud your application of American Representative Democracy to screen saver selection. You ask for votes and you'll do whatever you want.
"What savers do you want removed?"
"This one and this one and [...] "
"That's nice."
I love it! It's just like real politics! Good project leader!
(I vote that you remove nothing, everyone likes something obscure.)
It's called SHIFTING BLAME.
I hate greynetic with a passion. For the love of all that's holy, make it stop.
I have some lesser degree of dislike for:
anemone
appolonian
Bubbles
NerveRot
Slip
Twang
NerveRot can be configured to good.
I like a lot of the uglier ones as little glimpses of what was historically considered interesting, but I suppose an old version of xscreensaver itself would meet that need too. So here's mine:
ccurve, critical, crystal, greynetic (but not cynosure), deco, fadeplot, glforestfire, juggle, kumppa, lisa, lissie, loop, mismunch, munch, noseguy, petal, queens, rorschach, sphere, spiral, T3D, vines, xrayswarm
Not good (I'd drop 'em personally, but I don't hate them):
Anemone, attraction (balls), Bouboule, Braid, Compass, Critical, Cubenetic, CubeStorm, Demon, Discrete, FadePlot, Flag, Flow, Fluidballs, Goop, Kaleidoscope, Lament, Metaballs, Moire, Moire2, Mountain, Polyominoes, Providence, Slip, Solarwinds, Sonar, Spheremonics, Strange, T3D, Triangle, Truchet, WhirlwindWarp,
PLEASE drop:
Apollonian, Bubbles, Crystal, Cynosure, Deluxe, Eruption, Flame, GLForestFire, GLForestFire (rain), Greynetic, Helix, Hopalong, Laser, Lightning, Lisa, Loop, Mismunch, Munch, NerveRot, NerveRot(dense), NerveRot(thick), Pedal, Pulsar, Pulsar (textures), RD-Bomb, RD-Bomb (mobile), SBalls, Sierpinski, Speedmine,SpeedWorm, Sphere, Thornbird, Vines, XLyap.
These commenters have no sense of history or nostalgia. Why does your lj make me feel so OLD lately?
No kidding. For instance, how could you get rid of sierpinski?
Apollonian, Attraction, Critical, Cynosure, Engine, GLForestFire, Goop, Greynetic, Lavalite, Munch (but please keep mismunch)
I would probably add rd-bomb too if I knew what it's supposed to look like, but on every system I've ever had, it has chosen to segfault rather than do anything.
omg, Tones on Tail.
Yeah, Agreed. Tones on Tail are awesome... :)
I have to chime in that bouncingcow has got to stay.
Frankly, it seems to me that there's a lot of hate for the kind of 2D goofiness that reflects the same kind of screensavery as the original After Dark and that generation. On the other hand, I like (some of) them. I'm not especally fond of atlantis, but my girlfrends would probably use it exclusively if she used xscreensaver.
I appreciate that it's probably a PITA, especially with the porting effort to maintain all this crap, but if you're asking for purely aesthetic opinons, I think some people would probably be happy if you just grouped and packaged the various savers into categories (like "Geek", including julia and other fractal things, all the life clones, etc.; "Classic", for all the retro screensavers; "Animals" for atlantis, bouncingcow, antinspect, etc.; and so on) Of course, this is actually more work for you, and still probably won'te please everybody, but no matter what you do, if you totally remove screensavers, they are going to be "favorites" of some subset of users out there.
Except GLForestfire. Nuke that sucker.
I should mention, that if it were easier to say "remove the current screensaver from rotation", there's probably be a lot less complaints in general, but of course that's only possible when you can change the administrative interface, so it might be hard on the OS X port.
ditto, my cat *loves* bouncy cow
no seriously he sits and stares at it..though when the cow bounces off screen he gets a little confused.
how about reversing the question. each screensaver dies unless someone speaks up to rescue it. make a poll, let every voter rescue 1, kill the bottom 10%. or whatever.
Ah! The Trader Joe approach to screen savers!
I don't know why I'm responding because I don't use Linux anymore, but anyway back when I did I found the following really ugly:
Blaster (Fugly)
Deco (gives me that "I'm glad I don't have photosensitive epilepsy but I'd rather not risk it" feeling)
Greynetic (Same reason as Deco)
Metaballs (If it's capable of doing something non-stupid, I'm unaware of it)
Noseguy (There's a joke in there, but I'm too young to "get it", I think.)
I'd probably have more if I could get the OpenGL ones to work, but since I wasn't using the machine to play games, I really couldn't be bothered.
metaballs can be quite cool in 3d (see http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/BLOBS/blobs.html), but might be a bit tricky to implement in a quick way (the calculations get expensive, and you gotta convert them to triangles - blender's source could help)
Lavalite is implemented with metaballs.
<lj-raw>
These the the screensavers I do still have on random:
Apple2
BlockTube
BouncingCow
BoxFit
Cloudlife
Cynosure
Deluxe
Discrete
FlipText
FuzzyFlakes
GLSnake
Halftone
Interaggregate
Intermonmentary
Klein
Kumppa
Metaballs
Molecule
Nerverot
Nerverot (thick)
Pacman
Polyhedra
Polytopes
Popsquares
StarWars
StonerView
Substrate
Substrate (circles)
Tangram
WebCollage
WhirlyGig
XAnalogTV
(I'd add flurry, as well, but it segfaults when using ATI's fglrx driver :-/)
The only one I really think sucks enough to get rid of is GLForestFire.
Maybe a bit of perl to scan people's .xscreensaver files and mail you what's on and off might be easier?
</lj-raw>
You get that too?
I've been meaning to report it someday but I suspect it's a fglrx bug (since the stack frames are all in libGL.so), so jwz will just tell me to bug ATi.
With the latest fglrx drivers you can get flurry to work for almost 20 seconds in a window (it still crashes rapidly fullscreen).
<lj-raw>
It's an ATI bug, and I've reported it to them, but as their customer service model is built to keep the customers as far away from the company as is possible in polite society, I've seen no acknoledgement.
Possibly if everyone using fglrx who wants flurry to work (and glslideshow on the root window) sends them a bug report, they might start to care. Especially if you say "don't make me switch to nvidia".
</lj-raw>
My own preferences, for what they're worth, from a single pass through the list (and evaluating the GL ones separately, but then combining them into the one list):
Ones I don't really get or like (I.e., get rid of these, please): anemone, bouboule, critical, greynetic, halftone, lisa, lissie, lmorph, moire2, nerverot, rotor, slip, speedworm; boing, cubestorm, cage, glforestfire, morph3d, pulsar, stairs, superquadratics, t3d, twang
Enh: bumps, compass, decayscreen, deluxe, distort, flag, forest, halo, jigsaw, metaballs, noseguy, petri, piecewise, polytopes, ripples, rotzoomer, shadebobs, sonar, sphere, spotlight, whirlygig, xdaliclock (sorry!), xjack, xteevee; ant, antspotlight, atlantis, dangerball, gears, glflux, glblur, glknots, gltext, hypertorus, jigglypuff, lament, lavalite, menger, moebius, pipes, sballs, sierpinski3d
Enh.. I'm sure I'll get sick of it: fontglide, popsquares, slidescreen, speedmine, wormhole, zoom
Okay, but short rotation, I'll get sick of it: anemotaxis, c curve, eruption, fuzzyflakes, juggle, klein, penetrate, rocks, sierpinski, truchet, worm; antmaze, atunnel, blinkbox, blocktube, bouncingcow, cragberg, cubenetic, engine, fiberlamp, flipflop, flipscreen3d, juggler3d, mirrorball, pinion, providence, rubik, tangram
Okay, but short rotation: barcode, blitspin, braid, celtic, epicycle, goop, hyperball, interference, kumppa, laser, lightning, polyominoes, pyro, spiral, triangle, wander, xflame
Okay: blaster, bubbles, crystal, cynosure, deco, demon, fadeplot, fireworks, fluidballs, helix, kaleidoscope, memscroller, mismunch, munch, pacman, pedal, qix, rorschach, swirl, vidwhacker, webcollage, whirlwindwarp, xlyap; boxed, bubble3d, carousel, circuit, cube21, fliptext, flying toasters, glhanoi, glplanet, glslideshow, glsnake, polyhedra, queens, sproingies, starwars
Nice, but short rotation: attraction (though fewer modes), grav, vines, xrayswarm, xspirograph
Nice: boxfit, cloudlife, discrete, drift, euler2d, flame, flurry, intermomentary, loop, maze, mountain, noof, penrose, phosphor, pong, rdbomb, squiral, starfish, thombird, vermiculate
Great/classic: apple2, bsod, coral, flow, galaxy, hopalong, ifs, imsmap, interaggregate, julia, moire, strange, substrate, xanalogtv, xmatrix; endgame, gleidoscope, glmatrix, molecule, spheremonics, stonerview
Some of these would benefit from being shown for a shorter time.. they're okay, but pretty much one-trick shows that get old fast. On my home machine, I've only activated the ones from "nice, but short rotation" onwards. I know some of the ones I don't like -- esp. the GL ones -- are CS classics, but I don't really want to look at them.
how about anything that slowly and laboriously draws simple shapes over and over.
sphere
jumps to mind. i'd probably includeMountain
andForest
in that group too.Many screensavers that try to draw fire do it very unpleasingly,
GLForestFire
is the only one of those I see on your page, maybe Debian shoehorns more crap in.other than that, I hate 3D, but everyone else seems to like it.
i like all of the automata
Bad: GLForestFire, sballs
Dull: fadeplot, laser, sphere are kinda dull.
Not as good as they could be: lightning, rotor (I prefer the xlock one. Eh.)
I really like ifs and strange. Clearly those baying for its blood are Wrong.
The chess savers are elegantly rendered and should definitely stay. (They'd be really awesome if the pieces moved in natural being-picked-up paths - even better, if they were moved by disembodied hands or robot claws. No, I do not have a patch for this.)
See, this is the thing. I'm looking through the list so far and about half of them, I'm thinking, "No, don't get rid of that." So it is very largely a matter of taste. Except, as has been noted repeatedly, GLForestFire. :)
I personally wish there was a mode, perhaps default, where all screensavers that will grab a snapshot of whatever's on the screen and manipulate it are disabled. The first thing I have to do on most of my machines at work is hardlock them to a specific saver (just one that isn't annoying and doesn't screengrab) simply because I don't have time to go through the list and disable all the screengrabbers. If this is already possible, feel free to call me something unseemly and point me in the right direction. :-/
Oh, and the ones that just endlessly draw squares and things like that just remind me of "My first QBasic program", and I could happily do without them, because they're boring. Oh, and I have to concur with the noseguy one, I just don't get it either.
I could explain this to you, but instead I'll just call you a moron and leave it at that.
You can configure xscreensaver so it will never screengrab, but refer to a pallette of images of your choosing instead. On my system this is the default.
There is an option to not use shots of your desk, it uses a test patern (or a directory, or file that you chose). (I think this is the long polite version of what jwz said.)
Looking through I see one definite candidate: critical. WTF is that about? It has no technical or aesthetic value whatsoever.
Two others I think are kinda lame but not as bad: braid, vines.
Everything else is at least quietly inoffensive for a couple of minutes on random shuffle and adds some variety.
A few hacks I think are particularly awesome: substrate, ifs, apple2, lavalite.
I agree with you that critical is pretty awful (it's on my list too) but in its defense, it starts doing some marginally interesting things if you let it run for about two minutes. That's not nearly enough though.
Two minutes? It's been cycled out by then.
I'm curious, which are on your list?
No technical value? Critical is great. Self organized criticality expressed as a power-law random walk! Read the manpage.
I agree it's not visually interesting if you don't recognize what's going on, but it's definitely in the 'quaint snapshots of yesteryear cool' department for me.
Dude, it's a screensaver. I have a life. I am not going to read its fucking manpage before dropping it.
There are plenty of hacks which are based in interesting mathematics that look cool too, and I can think of plenty of better ways to visualise the maths behind critical.
It sucks.
My recommendation would be to drop spheres, critical, lightning, greynetic, cubenetic, laser, helix and the glforestfire ones.
Pyro has also always struck me as a little dissapointing in the eyecandy dept.
Have to completely agree, except for helix. Call it a silly fascination for spirograph pictures, but it's a nice way to get some low CPU eyecandy.
Greynetic always makes me want to relock the screen to get a different screensaver. It's like an epilepsy test designed by Ralph Furley.
in reverse alphabetical order, because I like to process lists that way:
pulsar
penrose
fiberlamp
deco
cubestorm
but... but... fibrelamp has kitch cool pouring out of every frame! I even had one of those lamps :)
Here are those that I usually turn off. The ones with a * are those that annoy me outright. When someone else's office I try not to have them in my field of vision
anemone
anemotaxis *
antinspect *
apollonian
attraction
blaster *
bouboule
braid *
bubbles
ccurve
colorfire
critical
crystal
dangerball
deluxe *
eruption *
flame
flipscreen3d
forest
glblur
glforestfire *
greynetic *
helix
hopalong
kaleidoscope
laser
lisa
lissie
loop
moire2 *
pedal
pulsar *
sballs
sphere
spiral
stairs
t3d
whirlygig
xspirograph
i might appreciate apollonian more if I knew what it was doing and the significance of the numbers.
I'm a little freaked out that people went to the depth they did about this. No offense intended, but the only screensaver I use is "blank screen". I need less stuff flashing in my life, not more.
Critical
Drift
FadePlot
Fiberlamp
Fireworx
Flame
Flow
Flurry
Gleidescope
Hopalong
Hyperball
Hypercube
Julia
Laser
Lightning
Lisa
Lissie
Moire2
Morph3D
Munch
NerveRot
Pedal
Penrose
Piecewise
Pipes
Providence
Pulsar
Qix
RD-Bomb
Rorschach
Rotor
Sierpinski
Sierpinski3D
Spiral
StonerView
Strange
Tangram
Thornbird
Vermiculate
Vines
Wander
WhirlwindWarp
WhirlyGig
Worm
XRaySwarm
I'm baffled by the calls to eliminate Appolonian and Lisa. Anemotaxis is one that makes me feel like I'm watching something happen, so I'd like to see it stick around. In truth, though, my
Is democracy really the answer? It's not like you've let every submission in the door. I would think everything you've allowed in appeals to some fraction of the audience. Maybe the solution is to demand sponsorships for ones you no longer like or are harder to port/maintain? Challenge people to patch or pay for hacks they want in order to salvage their favorite?
Please keep GLForestFire. It's so ugly, I can't live without it. No, I won't reveal my identity.
I think Critical is the single most annoying screensaver. (On a system I was using for two years it was the only one which crashed before you could see anything. I got really curious.)
How about pruning it down to the list of savers you personally think are worthwhile, and then dumping the pre-cleanup stable version on Sourceforge as "Xscreensaver Classic"?
-j
I've been playing with a Fedora 5 basic install (by which I mean that nothing much is installed unless it comes from Gnome) using VMWare player and decided to try to compile Xscreensaver 4.24 (which was not already installed because apparently Gnome just HAD to reinvent the wheel).
Since none of the devel packages were installed this quickly turned into a nightmare; but after slogging through, recursively installing every package that was depended upon by every package needed to build xscreensaver, I ended up with the situation that configure completed successfully with no warnings or errors, but the build failed when linking demo-GTK because libXmu-devel was not installed.
Just thought you might like to know...
*points and laughs*
You did what?
ncftp .../5/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS > ls xscreensaver-*
xscreensaver-base-4.24-1.1.i386.rpm
xscreensaver-extras-4.24-1.1.i386.rpm
xscreensaver-gl-extras-4.24-1.1.i386.rpm
They're, uh, in the distro, still.
They were not installed, and I wanted to build from source.
And as it turned out I found out something that might be good to know.
People who want to build from source should want to send me patches if they think something's wrong. People who don't want to do that should install binaries.
This comment made my day. I think I'll print it out and post it somewhere.
Um, last I checked yum follows dependencies for you just fine. You can even install apt if you'd rather use it.
Computers grow faster than xscreensaver.
You clearly need to move all of them to a C(XSSH)AN.
Ooh! With an integrated installation utility in the core!
I agree, dump GLForestFire! Also, i think 3 ant savers...Antmaze, Antinspect, Antspotlight...going a little overboard with the ants? I'd ditch Antmaze and Antinspect, the spotlight one is the neatest (imho). On the other-hand, can't get enough ants in Cali...
I lurrve noseguy (please don't axe him!). Same with bouncing cows and jack (even though my stupid distro omits them - one of these days I'm either switching distros or just downloading and installing xscreensaver from source because of it).
Wow, as the author of pulsar, I'm surprised people hate it so much.
I'm curious, is it because it doesn't attempt to render something realistic, or is it just unpleasant-in-a-painful-to-the-eye way?
For some time now I've wanted to write more savers, but the no-C++ constraint really makes it too painful. There's a lot of stuff in standard C++ that
makes all the heavy lifting in a saver a lot easier. In particular, I've wanted to write a generic scene graph library and physics system (or link in an existing one) so that people can just write XML files that describe the view and behavior of their saver, without writing any code. All the technology is there to make a really neat saver engine based on that concept. I just wouldn't want to implement it in C.
FWIW, I don't think pulsar is too shabby. I think it's in my default rotation even.
for me, it's the aesthetics, specifically the colors and the 2d/3d/what_the_clipping clash the rotating/intersecting planes seem to create in my mind.
jagged edges; my eyes tend to focus on the jagged edges, since that's where the most visible movement happens (the jaggedness jumps around a lot as the edges change angles.) Other than that, the overall aesthetic doesn't appeal much to me.
Keep 'em all. Disk is cheap. There's no compelling reason to dump them, short of vague and conflicting aesthetics. If there are any that actually contribute to screen burn-in (GL forest fire, and I think sonar might be candidates), possibly dump those.
Please remove at least 1/3 of them. It bogged down your software quality. Personally i'd remove 2/3 of them.
I like greynetic, deco, kumppa, bouboule, and nerverot. lots of people have been calling for their removal, I actually like them.
of course there are some I don't like, but not enough that it bothers me to do more than leave them out of .xscreensaver
must go: anemone, apollonian, attraction (everything but balls), blitspin, bubbles, C Curve (come on, over half the time it spends updating pixels I can't see), critical, crystal, cubestorm, cynosure, deluxe, demon, discrete, drift, endgame, euler2d, fadeplot, flame, flow, fluidballs, greynetic, helix, hopalong, hyperball, hypercube, ifs, julia, kaleidescope, klein, kumppa, lament, laser, lisa, lissie, menger, mismunch, moire, moire2, munch, nerverot, piecewise, providence, pulsar, qix, queens, rorschach, rotor, sballs, sierpinski, slip, sphere, spiral, squiral, stonerview, strange, thornbird, triangle, vermiculate, vines, wander, whirlwindwarp, whirlygig, worm, wormhole, xjack, xlyap, xspirograph
must stay: BouncingCow!, antspotlight, apple2, attraction (balls), barcode, blaster, bsod, bubble3d, bumps, cloudlife, decayscreen, deco, engine, eruption, flurry, FlyingToasters, fuzzyflakes, gears, glmatrix, grav, halftone, interference, juggle, lavalite, lightning, maze, metaballs, molecule, noseguy, penetrate, phosphor, pong, pyro, ripples, shadebobs, slidescreen, sonar, sproingies, starwars, vidwacker, xanalogtv, xflame, xmatrix, xrayswarm
I think part of the charm of xscreensaver is the bajilion screensavers. I vote you remove none of them.
I'm disappointed that no-one so far has asked you to axe glsnake :(
(My vote is remove none of them, disk is cheap, there's a config doobie that lets you turn off the ones you don't like, so who cares? Already people have asked that you keep the ones I want to nuke, so I reckon the easiset way out is to not remove any of them.)
My humble suggestions:
Side note: has anyone ever gotten a decent framerate out of Atlantis or Lavalite?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3613991741161374291
A example of a nonlame bouncing cow.
Bouboule is awesome. It's been my screensaver of choice for about the last seven years (yes, really), since the semester of compsci in which I learned C and C++.
When you need to relax, but you don't have time to relax properly (ie, leave the office/bedroom for more than fifteen minutes), then locking the screen with bouboule, switching off all the lights and just sitting in front of the computer and watching the points spin round for ten minutes, is a pretty damn good start. (True story.)
[j]
I'm behind the times, but please never get rid of flow (I've run it -root as wallpaper for years).
GLForestFire can go. BouncingCow and the man page for xjack must not.
Just don't delete the screensaver that goes PING.