MEme_bx·Oct 20, 2026Submission
4 points · Open discussionZygo
xscreensaver
C2013–2026
Zygo / xscreensaver
xscreensaver
The closest thing to a git repo of xscreensaver known to exist, because jwz Does Not Do Github. This is a READ ONLY mirror. Please send pull requests and bug reports directly to the upstream project.
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
288GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The closest thing to a git repo of xscreensaver known to exist, because jwz Does Not Do Github. This is a READ ONLY mirror. Please send pull requests and bug reports directly to the upstream project.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-04-30 09:07:13 UTC to 2026-10-20 12:13:29 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
6 sources> he put in a timebomb that would make it stop working on a certain date
I wrote 'some Debian developers have characterized [it] as having a "timebomb"'. because I do not agree with that assessment. It did not actually stop working on a certain date. It displayed a warning dialog box on the screen saver lock screen saying the package was out of date. Here is the bug report: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=819703 Here is the relevant code: https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/blob/379ea5d57c212863d2...
Nothing there about no longer working. (If "stop working on a certain date" makes something a time bomb, then expired certifications are certainly in Debian, like https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=844631 linking to https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=664177 "the [Certificate Transparency] i
Read the rest
nformation has a built-in build-time bomb of 10 weeks".)
Okay, "time bombs" are not malware. Got it.
My main point remains, Linux distributions handle far fewer packages than PyPI. "Debian comes with over 59000 packages" says https://www.debian.org/intro/about and PyPI has 455,474 projects says https://pypi.org/.
Can Debian developers handle 7x more packages? Almost certainly not. They couldn't even handle my software.
If a package maintainer already can't detect a "time bomb" with a huge warning message in the code, then why should I believe they are able to detect more subtle malware, especially with a 7x higher maintenance load?
I write specialist software with only a few thousand users world-wide. Do you really think each of the distros will have the people who are able to review and integrate my code into the distro at the same level as they do xscreensaver?
More realistically, they will reject my package as being out of scope, leaving me ... back at PyPI.
This led me on a short Google trip to find the Sun Openboot font:
Finding this:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/307356/what-is-the-...
And this is the TTF of that font: https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/blob/master/OSX/gallant...
In The Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.0Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcdKHCp9foY
Works on Unix, Mac, iOS and Android
Code mirror is here - https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver
W.P. van Paassen's metaballs C code is here -
https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/blob/master/hacks/metab...
Also, you can set various parameter tweaks for the metaballs from the command line or settings - count, radius etc.
In Show HN: MetaballsI'm glad I read the bug discussion before this discussion.
1. jwz is sorta famous and cool, I think. I've heard of him before this (and I'm not exactly hip!).
2. Debian is well known, too! /understatement
3. jwz put a timebomb in xscreensaver.
4. The timebomb displays a message if current date > source code date + 18 months.
5. The timebomb has been there for at least three years. See https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/blame/88cfe534a698a0562... (Unofficial repo)
6. I'm with Debian on this one. Sorry, jwz.
7. I really, really, really like xscreensavers and want it to stay in Debian! :(
In “This version of XScreenSaver is very old. Please upgrade”tlb of yc fame, turns out, is the guy who wrote the analog-tv-artifact-simulation code in jwz's xscreensaver:
https://github.com/Zygo/xscreensaver/blob/master/hacks/analo...
I have little doubt that all of jwz.org text rendering will be fully analogue-simulated once the monstrosity that is the supermajority of the installed base of web browsers supports such folly.
In Black Start