Screen savers and themes have largely died off thanks to those being a frequent malware vector. The other issue was the cost of operating large screen CRTs. Wasting millions on having screen savers run during lunch seems imprudent. jwz may prefer soul but failure to turn a profit tends to shorten corporate existence.

All too true. Themes, screen savers, everything used to give PC’s a little bit of personality, even though most came from boxed addons, or the later Plus! packs, and whatnot. But with the launch of Vista, and OS X being… well for some reason utterly devoid of any soul, yeah… blank screens.

What was wrong with virtual fish tanks? With modern GPU’s they’d at least look good.

“Any time some pedantic jerk says “YOU KNOW, screen savers aren’t really NECESSARY with modern monitors” I want to ask them “How awful is it to have been born without a soul?” Screen savers are art. As long as computers have screens, people will make art for them. I also find it amusing when I am in an art museum or gallery and see a “digital installation” where the only difference between that work and a “screen saver” is that they wrote an “artist’s statement” about how it explores the dichotomy between whatever — and/or someone gave them a grant for it.”

( https://www.jwz.org/blog/2017/01/sleep-mode-the-art-of-the-screensaver/ )

I will not be running UIs without screensavers and scrollbars on any computers I own (okay Gnome? 🙂 ).