Comment 86 for bug 101943

I just discovered this for myself, and deleted the braid screensaver myself, then came here to log the bug.

For me, on my Vostro 1700 with 'nVidia Corporation GeForce 8600M GT', and Compiz, the keyboard is completely locked out. Press caps-lock, no light. The mouse cursor moves, and I suspect there may still be things going on in there, but there's no way to prove that because there's just this pretty braid on the screen that won't go away. I had to press and hold the power button to shut it off cold several times before I made the connection and realized it was the screen saver. I went into the 'Screensaver' settings and tracked down which one it was, and lo and behold, the system hard-locked shortly after its preview popped up.

I recommend this be upgraded to 'critical', since it makes your computer DIE HORRIBLY.

A simple enough patch to REMOVE braid until the core problem is discovered seems reasonable to me. You can always put it back later if the bug gets sorted out. Until then, it makes Ubuntu UNSTABLE. If you're not going to carry drivers for things just because they're closed-source, why bundle things that RELIABLY KILL THE COMPUTER?

sudo rm /usr/lib/xscreensaver/braid

Perhaps a feature request:

Screensaver should certainly have a means to disable naughty screen savers, and detect when they're 'bad'. One good detection method might be write a little record when it launches a screen saver, and delete that record when the screen saver shuts down cleanly. In that way, the screen saver could 'know' which plugin isn't exiting cleanly, and black-list it automatically. Then instead of a permanent mystery crash, you'd get a one-time crash with a pop-up note explaining how it was fixed if you go into the Screensaver settings to see.