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Is it possible to change the screensaver randomly every, say, 5 minutes?

I mean that once the screensaver starts, it picks one at random, and after a few minutes, change the screensaver to another random one.

I've got XScreenSaver running, and because of the sheer amount of nice screensavers, I'd love to have some sort of "slideshow" of screensavers.

Is this at all possible?

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Yup. That's a feature of XScreenSaver. Run xscreensaver-demo, which is the user controls. You can run it from the terminal or command line of the system menu. If you've installed XScreenSaver, that is already on your system.

You have the option of random screensavers that change with a frequency you set, or a single screensaver that you select. From that dashboard, you can also fine-tune the action of each screensaver, test each screensaver to see it in action, control whether to lock the screen, and make other adjustments.

BTW, if you have XScreenSaver, download and add RSS-GLX; it should be in the Ubuntu repository. It's a collection of mind-blowing screensavers; the best thing since sliced bread. Its installer doesn't always work. You may need to follow their instructions to edit the XScreenSaver configuration file to manually add them. If you have trouble finding the instructions, ping me and I'll post how to do it.

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  • Thank you for your answer. I'm currently on my macbook, and I don't have a binary called xscreensaver-demo. Does it come with the mac build? I guess not. You have given me some clues though, I'm going to see if I can get this executable for mac. Thanks again.
    – Jeff Huijsmans
    Commented Nov 18, 2018 at 17:10
  • @JeffHuijsmans, that's kind of a critical component. I'd be surprised if it's excluded from the Mac version. But you can go directly to the source and download the complete package: jwz.org/xscreensaver. In case you didn't catch it, I added a goodie to the answer.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Nov 18, 2018 at 17:18
  • It is excluded, unfortunately. Just installed the latest version over an older one on my mac, and I could not find any xscreensaver-demo binary, unfortunately. ReallySlickScreensavers! Wow, that's a long time ago, thank you for that. I knew XScreenSave was not the only package of awesome screensavers. Thanks!
    – Jeff Huijsmans
    Commented Nov 18, 2018 at 17:26
  • The business with xscreensaver-demo seems a bit fishy, but just for the halibut, try the command anyway just to see if it runs. That's the user controls, so maybe they've done something different in the Mac version. You might want to contact JWZ and ask them about it.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Nov 18, 2018 at 17:35
  • From their web site: "On macOS systems, these screen savers work with the usual macOS screen saving framework (X11 is not required). " Maybe all of the controls (whatever controls there are on Mac), are in the Mac system configuration tools. I'm not at all familiar with Mac, so can't help there.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Nov 18, 2018 at 17:49

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