I used Windows 95 for a while in the late 90s, and while setting my preferences for the desktop wallpaper, screensaver and such, I noticed that Windows 95 had a spiffy "maze" screensaver. It seemed to rotate and move from the perspective of someone moving through it. Some sort of random shapes or artwork occasionally appeared in it (my memory of this detail is vague), and it might have been rendered in 3-D or Windows 95's best approximation thereof.

Has anyone ever seen a version of this that can be used in Linux? I don't even use screensavers much anymore, but when I do, I wish I had the maze screensaver.

have you looked into the gnome-extras and GL-extras screensavers

Nope...I'll do so.

That's one reason I don't like the big DEs like Gnome/KDE - a simple window manager like Fluxbox makes it much easier to use a screensaver as wallpaper.

You must not mean literally turning a screensaver into wallpaper, because moving screensavers like the starfield, flying objects (windows, toasters, toilets), the marquee or the maze I mentioned would not look particularly good as a static image.

I have the impression that screensavers are obsolete anyway except as tools of personal expression. Their original purpose was to prevent phosphor burn-in, and I assume today's monitors aren't susceptible to phosphor burn-in. But personal expression generally was why I used them anyway. Either that or because they were just spiffy, like the rotating maze.

Pretty much…LCDs work by aligning liquid crystal molecules to polarize the passage of light through each pixel (or in the case of a color LCD, each subpixel), so you can't really "burn in" an LCD pixel. It is possible to have an LCD with a "stuck" pixel (i.e. a pixel whose color won't change), but this is generally a manufacturing defect, and isn't something that can happen due to a static image being shown for an extended period of time AFAIK.

I personally don't bother with screensavers; as you said, they're rather obsolete, and pretty much just waste power (a screensaver's gonna use extra CPU/GPU cycles). For that matter, you don't even technically need a screensaver on a CRT; just turn the display off after a certain time (on monitors that support a "sleep/standby" mode).

No, I meant running them in the root window to have a moving backdrop behind whatever windows you have open, rather than a static image. The big DEs tend to make it harder to do, presumably because it conflicts with their methods for drawing desktop icons. Either that or they figure it's just too distracting!

I suppose whether it still counts as 'wallpaper' when it's a moving image would be a matter of opinion.