Muryan

As of today I’m retiring all my macOS screen savers: Ephemeral, Nebular, and Fronds.

As much as I like sharing my work, the problems with macOS these days are just too much. The quality of Apple’s software has been dropping for years, and it’s reached the point where it is not possible to get my screen savers working correctly. Screen savers are meant to be a bit of fun, and they’re definitely not fun any more.

Screen savers are very much second-class citizens in macOS. The API has always had minimal documentation. Every now and then Apple changes the way macOS interacts with them without notice and breaks them. And on it goes.

With recent versions of macOS, Apple have introduced a particularly stupid new bug into their code: after running what they term a legacy screen saver, their launcher process “legacyScreenSaver (Wallpaper)” continues running and uses up an entire CPU. Each time it launches the screen saver it eats another CPU. And it’s not just my screen saver, it’s any of the older-style screen savers. This has been a problem for years now. A bug this obvious would be found by even the most rudimentary testing, but Apple just don’t care. And now I don’t care either.

Anyhow, I’m not willing to distribute macOS screen savers when using them is going to trigger this macOS bug and eat CPUs and batteries. So I’m pulling them all.