Seconded. I have worked on linux for 15 years doing software dev and some IT. Nobody knows that stuff in detail unless they have to because of some arkane deployment reason. Any half good local llm will be miles ahead of most books. Tell it what you need, it will spit out some code, understand the code and ask it or search online how it works exactly. Rinse and repeat.

You seem to have a very idealized idea of how selfless this whole thing is. Google has sponsored a lot of work in the kernel, so have multiple corporations over the years. This is not some puppies and raibows shit here.

It just happens to work really well because the license and multiple interest of a good kernel do just that: a good kernel.

Surveillance issues and too strong corporations are an issue with your government, not the kernel

The point is that in the correct hands it does not.

Nah, they just would have either used something else, or fucked us with some other way. The kernel license just allowed them to do it like this.

One init system is the new standard, widely adopted by all serious distros, installed and configured by default. It is opinionated, spits in the eye of most experienced IT admins but is the only real alternative for who needs to earn a living with linux. It is well supported and understood… The others are well established standards that did not survive the test of time and are slowly dying out, kept around by nostalgic hobbyists that will catch any mention of systemd as an excuse to profess their hate for poettering, binary logs or some udev or logind babbling.

Tldr: systemd if you don’t want to bother, any other if you want to play

Why are screensavers still used?

Nothing that causes pixels to change color “saves” anything these days, unless you have some kind of old LCD display.

Wayland has no limitations for how a traditional screensaver should work, nobody bothered to implement one, that is why there isn’t one yet IMO.

Hate to be the guy but if you need one you either need to hack something on top of xscreensaver like others in the thread said, or implement something native for those that need it to protect their old monitor.

That said, in case you don’t actually need a screensaver but a looping video for a kiosk type of situation you might just setup a videoplayer in a loop and turn off screen power saving.

This works. You can also cat image.iso >/dev/sdx

I always laugh at windows users with their external random apps to do something elementary

Ground news is a service, if you like it, pay for it.

That kind of stuff is not where FOSS excels