gnome-screensaver is the GNOME project's official screen blanking and locking framework. On some GNOME-based Linux distributions, it is used instead of the framework that is a part of XScreenSaver.
On these systems, the screen savers themselves still come from the XScreenSaver collection. gnome-screensaver is just the user interface.
The gnome-screensaver interface is designed for improved integration with a GNOME desktop, including themeability, language support, and Human interface guidelines compliance. However, it no longer runs any screensavers and is more properly referred to as a screen blanker.
Compared to the front end included with XScreenSaver, gnome-screensaver has a simplified interface but less customizability. For instance, users may not select which screensavers to select at random – either only one is selected or the program randomly selects from the whole list. In addition, the inability to configure individual screensavers and the developers' response to this issue has been criticized by some users. It also lacks a setting to control cycling through different screensavers.
In GNOME 3, gnome-screensaver has been drastically simplified, supporting only screen blanking and no graphical screen savers.
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