The worst possible thing happened to them today: They had to CLICK OK on a dialog box after they rebooted!!Oh death, where is thy sting.
Dear CentOS: Since you refuse to roll out a new version more frequently than every two years, please stop shipping XScreenSaver.
I thank you, and your users thank you.
Let’s see if they handle it better than the BSD folks...
I'm not sure what you mean - in general FreeBSD has one of the most up-to-date package collections. For XScreenSaver in particular it has 5.38 in the ports collection and I expect 5.39 will arrive within a few days.
While I'm not involved in other BSDs I expect they all have at least a relatively recent version.
Who's running CentOS on the desktop, anyway? Who are these insane people?
I was going to make a joke about Slackware here but turns out their XScreenSaver is 100% up to date.
"Who's running CentOS on the desktop, anyway? Who are these insane people?"
Perhaps people who are the target market for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop/Workstation but who don't have, or don't want to spend, the money on licensing.
Still just wondering who would eschew the main draw of RHEL for budgetary reasons then choose to run a distro that's based on years-old software. Probably the same people that complain when a developer drops WinXP support. In 2018.
Who? People who need to run software that is only certified on very specific OS versions (e.g. some CAD tools) or run hardware that only has drivers for specific versions (e.g. oldish PCIe boards). Yes, you may try to run on other versions, but you're asking for a world of pain. Try to avoid unnecessary worlds of pain.
I didn't realize the Linux kernel deprecated very specific, old-ish PCIe drivers. I thought that pretty much never happened. My bad.
In any case, the original jwz argument stands. If you're running CentOS you should know you're choosing/forced to run old software and perhaps take two seconds to check before you go firing off bug reports willy-nilly.
My favorite jwz comment from the previous thread:
|| which distro do you recommend?
| MacOS 10.11.
It's not the drivers bundled with the kernel, it's ones written by small manufacturers. I agree with everything else you say.
You mean folks that don't need screensavers?
I support my fair share of embedded Linux boxes, and never has it been a problem when the screensaver has gone rancid -- because there isn't one to go rancid to begin with.
The screen displays what it displays, for however long it displays that, and then it turns off. These applications that I'm familiar with would be afraid of something like xscreensaver.
You're right, these applications don't need screensavers, and as mike says below, they aren't in the standard install, so sadly no 300-post flamewar this time.
What I was trying to show is why someone might run an old OS like Centos 6.9 (End of life in 2020, albeit with major security updates only).
Those people who need to run systems that act very much like RHEL, e.g. for development, testing, compatibility or other purposes, but don't need support and/or don't want to spend the licensing cost.
Last I checked CentOS was 100% binary compatible with RHEL, so for all but the most odd use cases (things that check for active RHN subscriptions or the exact format of the /etc/redhat-release file or something) CentOS is good enough.
But when I do this I also understand that I'm running old(er) software and the consequences that come with it, so... ::shrug::
why is there the need to have this dumb nag?
who cares how old a screensaver is?
As written by jwz in the xscreensaver source code, as also quoted in the linked post about Debian:
Another quote, probably more important for CentOS users:
Today in off-topicality: Space hotel
Today in on-topicality: Open source hardware
It occurred to me I have a CentOS server so I looked in the repos to see what the version of XScreenSaver is there. Turns out, none. CentOS doesn't include XScreenSaver. I would guess most people using XScreenSaver on CentOS are using the packages from Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
The package for CentOS6 is version 5.11 built in 2010
https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/Packages/x/
The package for CentOS 7 is version 5.35 built in 2016.
https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/x/