As per http://live.gnome.org/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#head-d50bc17e7d6f3a51c4715f02c657195e80e26c2c .

$ gnome-screensaver --version
gnome-screensaver 2.16.1

In short: 
Gnome-screensaver should allow for editing the options of screensavers. The ease with which this integral feature was removed and the fallacies inherent in it's accompanying rationalisation are both equally astonishing. The ability to configure screensavers is a necessary staple of the field and an activity I have spent many hours, over the years, happily performing. I hereby recommend that it be restored in a future version.


The Long Haul (you can skip this bit):
I tried installing the popular ( http://electricsheep.org/index.cgi?&menu=about ) ElectricSheep screensaver, it's prettiness far outweighing the usage of my spare cycles. Thus began my first encounter with gnome-screensaver. I use Ubuntu. I, for some dangerously deluded reason, expected this to be a simple task.

To make a long story short, I had to google how to make gnome-screensaver aware of this file. This annoyed me, greatly. I switched off gentoo so I could stop having to google facts and read long winded FAQs and, most importantly, not download scripts off CVS'. ( http://live.gnome.org/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAskedQuestions ) I feel that any replacement for a widely used app should be backwards compatible with this sort of thing. Anyways,

** The bulk of the relevant complaint **

The issue at hand. This, ElectricSheep, is a screensaver that has some useful things to configure. It allows you to pick how to download things, and return some other variables. You can set how many hundreds of megabytes it can cache or not. Etc. There are many other apps with similar, useful ideas. xmatrix lets you set which fonts to use, apple ii allows you to pick which format it will display things in. SETI lets you set a username and I imagine there are any other number of "calculate crap while I'm away" screensavers that have similar requirements.

Whoever wrote this app, however, disagrees with me. Using the male pronoun for the sake of simplicity, he states that in the world of screensavers there is a responsibility to the user for sensible defaults. That unsafe defaults cause pain and hardship, that we cannot allow "The CEO is a dick" messages to prevail  in unsecured workstations. He even goes as far as saying "It is my contention that xscreensaver "hacks" that operate on data sources have no sensible default configuration because they are really theme engines and not themes."

I have news for you, dude. No one fucking cares. It is such a meaningless and academic difference that I suspect no one outside of a xscreensaver hack developer can tell them apart, which is an astonishingly small subset of the potential user population. The rest of us call the collection of imageries that occur after a preset amount of user input idleness "a screensaver".

While it might be useful to set restrictions on what a user CAN configure, it is of no relevance to the other 97% of users, and thus extraordinarily silly to have it set for everyone else. I seriously don't want to edit no text file for a goddamn screensaver.

So, take note. If there are no sensible defaults, don't include it by default. If I really want it, I'll install it and from that point on it's my trouble to find its defaults. If I want to have such a flashy screensaver that it maxes out my graphics card and pulls my CPU to 100%, it's my goddamn right to do so. How on earth is it any easier to manually set sets of pictures as favourites instead of ALSO being able to just set whole folders?

The idea that you can have a separate entry for each variation is nice but needlessly complicated: certain screensavers could easily have dozens of minor variations.

All remaining "benefits" of the new model can easily be abstracted away from my eyes, just the same way I didn't have to care about themes and theme engines.

Bring back the configure button. There are somethings you just can't or shouldn't oversimplify.