Un-Ubuntuing Ubuntu, Again

Ubuntu makes no secret of the fact that they will choose something that looks good but doesn’t work over something that works. That’s pretty much the entire point of this blog post. Because xscreensaver uses an older X widget kit than light-locker, and so looks “antiquated”, they switched to light-locker for 14.04. Light-locker doesn’t atually work well, and causes many, many, many laptops to not return from suspend mode without a hard reset.

If you’d rather use software that works, you have to change some settings and remove a bunch of stuff. I removed light-locker, light-locker-settings, and gnome-screensaver. I also installed xscreensaver.

In order to lock on lid close, I started xfce4-settings-editor, selected xfce4-power-manager, and set/checked both lock-screen-suspend-hibernate and logind-handle-lid-swtich.

I currently get two login prompts when I unsuspend, one from xscreensaver and one from something else. I suspect the second one is logind, so I can get rid of the xscreensaver one by making xscreensaver not do screen locking.