Try These Lockscreens For Your Window Managers

So, let's spend a couple of minutes talking about lock screens for your window managers. Many of you guys, if you're a fan of my content, you probably are a fan of window manager only setups. Maybe you use standalone floating window managers like Open Box or Flux Box or ISWM, things like that. Or maybe you use tiling window managers. Right now, you're looking at my Q-tile desktop. And sometimes you want a lock screen for your window manager setup. And there are many third-party lock screen programs you can go out there and install. One I've used for many years now has been Suckless's Slock program for Simple Lock or Suckless Lock. It is not fancy at all. But if you want to use Slock, in my case, I've got this as part of a rophi menu here where I can choose to lock the screen right now. And this is Slock. And if I start typing my password, the screen turns blue. If I type a bad password, the screen will turn red. But that's all it is. That's uh Suckless's Sock. Very simple program. Now, most people are not going to be a fan of that kind of really minimal program. Most of you guys want a fancy lock screen and one of the best ones out there is this program called Better Lock Screen. Now, Better Lock Screen, you can find the source code over on GitHub. It's licensed under the MIT license. It's basically a bash script. It's a wrapper around another program called I3 Lock. But what it does, it takes a picture, you give it an image, and it creates this background with some effects, and it gives the time, and then you start typing a password, and it unlocks the screen. And because it uses the i3 lock, obviously, it's for X11 window managers. Everything I talk about will be for X11 window managers today because that's what I'm in as I'm recording this video. But you guys that are on Wayland window managers, I mean, Sway has a program called Sway Lock. Hyperland has a program called Hyperlock. But if you're on X11 window managers, then this better lock screen program, which uses i3 lock as a dependency, is actually really neat. Now, let me show you how this works. So, install better lock screen. If you're on arts, you'll find better lock screen in the AUR. And if you type better lock screen without any arguments, you'll get the help page. And let me zoom in here. And the very first thing you want to do uh if you try to run better lock screen uh without setting an image, it's just going to be a black screen. It's essentially like slock, right? It's a black screen. You start typing your password, it unlocks the screen. You probably want to use an image. So dash u to update the lock screen image. So let's do that. So let me clear the screen here and let me type better lock screen- and let's give it the path to a image. So, let's go to uh user share backgrounds, which is where most of your background images are on your computer. That's where the default wallpaper packs typically are on a Linux system. And I have a wallpaper pack called DTOS-backgrounds for DTOS. And let me pick a image. And I've got oh, a lot of images here. Well, let's do uh number two out of that wallpaper pack. And you can see it's going to grab an image and it's going to do some effects. dimming and blurring and pixelating and things. Also, because I have three different monitors, it's going to create three different images. So, it's going to take a few seconds here. And now that it has finished rendering that image, now let me run better lock screen and give it the d-lock flag. And that actually activates better lock screen. And now I need to enter my password. And if I enter it correctly, obviously it unlocks the screen. Now, that was me using better lock screen without any effects. If you wanted to, you could do something like uh better, if I can spell correctly, better lock screen space- lock to lock the screen. You could also just do a single dash L. That also locks the screen. And you could do something like the blur effect. And you see now the image has a little bit of blurring in it. If I wanted to, I could add a dim effect. And you can see now the image is dimmed a little bit. And you can actually update uh the image and add a dimming and blurring and various different effects to the cached image if you want that on a permanent basis or you can choose to add the blurring or dimming or just have the regular image like I initially used. So that's really all there is to better lock screen. I mean there's some other settings and things you can play with but it's not a very complicated program right other than setting an image that's probably all you need to do with it. Now there is another kind of a cool better lock screen that's out there if you run Arco Linux. Arco Linux they have their uh logout program which was originally called Arco Linux- Logout. Now they've changed it to Arch Linux- Logout. And what this program is uh it's basically something that runs on top of better lock screen. So, uh, it's got some Python dependencies, but what this is, let me show you this in action. If I go to Arch Lin, Arch Linux- logout, I'm just going to run it from roy. This is Arch Linux- logout. It's a kind of a transparent background, right? It's a dark um transparency. And then you've got some icons here for cancel, log out, reboot, shut down, yada yada yada, escape to get out of that. If you're on Arco Linux, you'll find Arch Linux-Log in the Arco Linux repositories. If you're on any other Arch Linuxbased system, uh Arch Linux- Logout, I couldn't find it in the AUR. Arco Linux- Logout, which was the old name for it, is still in the AUR. I don't know if it builds properly or not. Uh I didn't try to install this package because I actually do have the Arco Linux repos on my system. So, I just grabbed the Arch Linux- logout program. But if for some reason this doesn't build properly, all you need to do, I guess you could just build it from source. Uh, obviously here's the source code. Or you could go find a package build for this. I didn't find a package build in this repo, but in one of the Arco Linux repos, you'll find all the package builds that they use to create their packages. Find the package build for Arch Linux- logout and then just run a make package the same as you would manually building any AUR package yourself. For me, I'm quite happy with either of these programs or both these programs. I've got both installed, but I I do really quite like better lock screen just for the neat, you know, things you can do with some of the background images. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Matt Steve, 40mm, kept caveman, Daroth, Lee, Mark, Methos, Urion, Paul, Peace, Arch, Madora, Realities for Less, Red Profit, Roland, Wentu, and Abuntu, and Willie. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at some of these lock screen programs would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. If you like my work, want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like better lock screen, subscribe to Dro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.