Show HN: Play Pokémon to unlock your Wayland session

(github.com)

48 points | by anajimi 2 days ago ago

15 comments

  • OsrsNeedsf2P an hour ago

    Heavy customization is important to me on the Linux desktop. This project has given me a lot more faith in Wayland than 5 years of hearing debates about it.

  • skerit 2 hours ago

    Incredible that we're getting something like this before a plain good old screensaver

    • derefr an hour ago

      For use with vintage computers that use CRTs? If not, what kind of oddball display / use-case do you have, where it would be better to play a screensaver than to follow the usual modern flow of display dim -> display black -> display sleep -> computer lock -> [maybe] computer sleep?

      • KetoManx64 19 minutes ago

        One of the great strengths of Linux, and one of the things that draws new people in, is the custizability and making the system your own to whatever degree you want. That a "modern" display manager doesn't let you have a screensaver and people try to cover up for it with "you're just trying to use your system wrong. Be normal and use your system like we say is normal" is embarassing.

      • free_bip 34 minutes ago

        OLEDs still have burn-in issues even with all the fancy mitigation systems they have.

      • throitallaway 19 minutes ago

        If there's one thing I never tire of, it's someone telling me that I don't need something or how I'm doing it wrong. I would love a screensaver that scrubs my OLED pixels.

    • anajimi an hour ago

      Thanks for your idea! I think it is totally possible to implement a screensaver with the ext-session-lock protocol. I will try to explore this idea when I have time in the next few months :)

      • DrewRWx an hour ago

        Do you have a Ko-fi? 'cause I would really enjoy that screensaver.

        I adore this project on its own merits too because using the memory values in an emulated game is something that has fascinated me since Twitch Plays Pokémon integrated their Twitch display!

  • d3Xt3r a day ago

    Ah, goody. Looks like I found the only other Wayland user on HN. ;)

    You should also post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837981

    • jchw an hour ago

      On the KDE side, Wayland has been going pretty well. Wayland sessions make up 82% of all sessions with telemetry enabled.

      https://blogs.kde.org/2025/03/15/this-week-in-plasma-file-tr...

      For me the real conundrum was SwayWM vs KDE Wayland rather than any X.org session; I really felt like SwayWM was a good upgrade from i3wm and gave me a better desktop session with much less hacks. Hope to see wlroots push forward and support some of the newer Wayland protocols, it has started to fall behind a little bit, but I think it's good for alternative desktops.

      • OsrsNeedsf2P an hour ago

        I run Wayland but I'm not happy about it. Most autoclickers still don't work, and autotypers need sudo and group magic to get working.

    • juujian an hour ago

      The trick was to switch to AMD (screw NVIDIA on Linux).

    • anajimi a day ago

      Thank you for the link! Hope to see more people using Wayland then :D

    • righthand an hour ago

      There are dozens of us…dozens!

  • rtsang1 an hour ago

    For a moment, I thought the punchline was that users needed to play through the game and clear the elite four to unlock their session.