[RFC] [cinnamon-screensaver] Add a toggle for shade_wallpaper

[Kotbenek]

Hello,

After upgrading to Linux Mint 22.2 Zara, my manual changes to cinnamon-screensaver I already forgot about were undone, and that brought me here, to ask for comments.

I have the following use case:
I have a single image wallpaper on my desktop, that is a photo. When I lock the screen, the wallpaper gets darker, making the photo - well - too dark. The shading is done by shade_wallpaper function in monitorView.py:

    def shade_wallpaper(self, widget, cr):
        """
        This draw callback adds a shade mask over the current
        image.  It is uniform when not Awake, and acquires a
        significant gradient vertically framing the unlock dialog
        when Awake.
        """
        cr.set_source_rgba(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.7)
        cr.paint()
        return False

The line responsible for shading is cr.set_source_rgba(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.7). By changing the value 0.7 to 0.0, the wallpaper is no longer being shaded on the lock screen.

The question is - is it acceptable to add an additional org.cinnamon.desktop.screensaver field that controls the shading (with default set to true, to preserve current behavior)? I am aware of linuxmint/mint22.1-beta#4 (comment) - that is why I want to gather the comments before starting any work. To provide a proof of demand, I can show the following forum threads:

• https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=291264
• https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=298714

The first thread, from March 2019, shows both the need and the solution - manually editing /usr/share/cinnamon-screensaver/monitorView.py after each cinnamon update. The second thread, few months later, mentions the first thread as the solution. This means, there probably are some users that could benefit from this change.

This change seems relatively simple and should not add much maintenance costs.

If there are any alternative ideas, I will be also happy to hear about them.

[AtomicRobotMan0101]

Came here tonight to say exactly this!

I'd love it to be a field in dconf: org.cinnamon.desktop.screensaver as "dimming-value"=0.7 and user editable.

Reason being is Im setting up quite a few new customer-facing machines at work and the screensavers are on a rotating image display. When they dim the photos look... dim.

Im running a script now that changes xrandr --output HDMI-0 --brightness 1 by checking if cinnamon-screensaver-command is active... but it feels dreadfully sloppy.

[Kotbenek]

Bumping this thread, as I stumbled upon this once again after upgrading to Linux Mint 22.3.

It looks like there are people that could benefit from that addition.
@clefebvre What are your thoughts about it?