Toasty balls
Any respectable PC user in the early ’90s owned a copy of the irreverent and inimitable After Dark. It brought some uplift to those dull moments waiting for something to happen as the screensaver kicked in and some entertaining graphics worked their way across the glass.
From a ride-on lawnmower to a city skyline, they were entertaining and fun ways to prevent burn-in on expensive monitors.
It’s a shame the internet made writing and maintaining such frivolities uneconomic — with a seemingly endless list of free screensavers there was no need for anyone to pay for them, and thus came the end of an era.
In homage to the originals I’ve developed a couple of my own KDE Plasma 6 wallpaper plugins which can be used as screensavers (handy for those with OLED monitors), and they’re free to download on the KDE store — or from within KDE itself.
balls drop, bounce, and pile to the brimballdrop↗ open on gitlab
If you haven’t seen the original After Dark screensavers, they’re well worth a look — there are plenty of videos demoing what they look like, and a fun look back at how playful computing used to be.
Enjoy — and keep an eye out for a little toasty stowaway.