Arch Linux

olive

Member

From: Belgium

Registered: 2008-06-22

Posts: 1,490

What is the difference between the screensaver and dpms

There seems to be two different ways to configure screen blanking, both mentioned in xset. Blanking the screen with the screensaver or use dpms. What is the difference between the two? Both seems to do exactly the same thing: to power off the monitor. I understand that some monitors might react differently to the standby, poweroff and blanking mode of dpms (although, I have yet to see a monitor that do); but what with the "screensaver"?

Last edited by olive (2015-10-13 11:19:41)

Raynman

Member

Registered: 2011-10-22

Posts: 1,539

Re: What is the difference between the screensaver and dpms

The screen saver is older than DPMS. These days the setting defaults to "prefer blanking" which means turning the screen off. If the hardware doesn't support this or if you set

$ xset s noblank

then it will instead display some (built-in) pattern (the XSS extension adds support for external programs to hook into this and display prettier pictures, although not all DE screensaver components seem to use this properly). By setting the timeouts appropriately, you can make it show a pattern first before activating DPMS.