Screensavers, lost

I was disappointed to discover today that Yuji Adachi’s Fliqlo screensaver, which turns the screen into a flip clock, no longer works in macOS Sonoma. The Fliqlo website mentions a bug in Sonoma’s screensaver engine.

So I decided to renew my acquaintance with Simon Hey’s Word Clock screensaver, which works — but now uses an inordinate amount of memory. For the first time in ages, I could hear the MacBook Air fan firing up as the screensaver ran. The Activity Monitor showed Word Clock using close to 1GB of RAM.

I then tried two humble built-in screensavers, Drift and Hello, and with each, the fan fired up. I shouldn’t have been surprised: online discussions report enormous amounts of memory use with so-called legacy screensavers. The Apple screensavers named for versions of macOS (Sonoma, Ventura, Monterey) seem to work without problems, but the swirling colors aren’t to my taste. And I wouldn’t dare try one of Sonoma’s new video screensavers.

The simple though unhappy fix, at least for me, is to skip using any screensaver, at least until a Sonoma update fixes the engine trouble.