Hi,

I'm using arch with the latest KDE release and a few upgrades ago a new but highly annoying and buggy feature was added to the lock screen: it now shows the last media player instance.

I have not found any way to disable this highly annoying feature anywhere, can someone give me a pointer ?

I want to disable this mainly for the two following reasons:
- When I have the media player window, it still shows up in the lock screen and the process has not quit as it should have which cause a variety of issues.
- When the video was paused, upon getting out of suspend the video automatically resume playing, meaning I now have unwanted sound that will not stop until the correct password is entered and the player is manually paused again.

If there is no way to disbale/remove this "feature" maybe you can point me to an alternative to the lockscreen so I can get rid of this nuisance before I hammer my laptop.

Thanks

Am the only one affected by this or is it that no one knows ? Or worse that this is a half baked 'feature' with no settings ?

Do you mean the Media Controls on lock screen ?



Added with the plasma 5.10:
- https://phabricator.kde.org/D3684
- https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.10.0.php

or something else ?

Maybe a picture will help - you could run the lock screen greeter in testing mode:

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/usr/lib/kscreenlocker_greet --testing

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$ /usr/lib/kscreenlocker_greet --help
Usage: /usr/lib/kscreenlocker_greet [options]
Greeter for the KDE Plasma Workspaces Screen locker

Options:
  -h, --help                  Displays this help.
  -v, --version               Displays version information.
  --testing                   Starts the greeter in testing mode
  --theme <theme>             Starts the greeter with the selected theme (only
                              in Testing mode)
  --immediateLock             Lock immediately, ignoring any grace time etc.
  --graceTime <milliseconds>  Delay till the lock user interface gets shown in
                              milliseconds.
  --nolock                    Don't show any lock user interface.
  --switchuser                Default to the switch user UI.
  --ksldfd <fd>               File descriptor for connecting to ksld.

Yes this is what I mean, except I did not know there were control buttons as I have a white background lock screen.

How do I get rid of this ? hopefully it will then stop preventing the media players from quitting when I close them.

https://phabricator.kde.org/D3684 - add the configuration option later:

What's to be done:

Allow to disable this for privacy reasons

Meanwhile - the /usr/share/plasma/look-and-feel/org.kde.breeze.desktop/contents/lockscreen/LockScreenUi.qml has:

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active: true // TODO configurable

You could turn this to the 'false'.



This will remove the MediaControls.qml from the lock screen greeter. Hopefully it will then stop preventing the media players from quitting when you close them. Note ! Even if this works a bug report will be a good idea so the developers will remember to add the configuration option to the next plasma release.

I'm gonna give this a try right now and I'll report back.

Sadly I stopped writing bug report, I used to invest time going through the tedious process of reporting bugs but almost all did not lead to a fix or improvement. I've even been dismissed / dissed at times. Recently Mozilla burned all the good will I had to fill big report for a while.

My experience is that asking on boards and forums is way more effective, even if this forum registration process is highly annoying and requires to allow scripting from google which is usually a show stopper for privacy reasons.

Changing this setting to false seems to have no effect, the controls are still appearing on the lock screen.

Is there a rationale somewhere for adding this feature you could refer me to ?

Changing it to false did help in my case (KDE Plasma 5.10.5, Debian testing).

This indeed should have been configurable to begin with.

Using a laptop affected by this nonsense that suspended itself due to low battery I noticed something new here.

A video put in pause while listening to an audio file started playing itself as the screen locked itself before suspending.
After plugging the laptop I resumed the session and sure enough I got a lock screen with the video playing, and added bonus the audio file resume playing over and bugged as the speakers blared some stuttering infernal noise over the video. Quite the unpleasant experience.

Still no option to disable or uninstall this ?

kderegistrationishighlyannoying wrote:Changing this setting to false seems to have no effect, the controls are still appearing on the lock screen.

Maybe this is because your flavour of Linux distribution has some customisations with this configuration file. For example, openSUSE Tumbleweed has its own configuration file although that file has almost the same content as this one, and the customised file overrides this file so you need to make change to that file instead.

And I am using openSUSE Tumbleweed, so I changed both of the following configuration files,

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/usr/share/plasma/look-and-feel/org.openSUSE.desktop/contents/lockscreen/LockScreenUi.qml
/usr/share/plasma/look-and-feel/org.kde.breeze.desktop/contents/lockscreen/LockScreenUi.qml

I am just guessing. Please refer to https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/525618-How-to-disable-media-controls-on-lock-screen as the source.

KDE Phabricator - Make media controls configurable: https://phabricator.kde.org/D9601 -> Load config specified by the LnF theme: https://phabricator.kde.org/D9684

... and with the Plasma 5.12 - Plasma 5.12 LTS Beta: https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.11.95.php :

Media Controls on Lock Screen

Media controls have been added to the lock screen, which can be disabled since Plasma 5.12 for added privacy. Moreover, music will automatically pause when the system suspends.

Rog131 wrote:... and with the Plasma 5.12 - Plasma 5.12 LTS Beta: https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.11.95.php :

Media Controls on Lock Screen
Media controls have been added to the lock screen, which can be disabled since Plasma 5.12 for added privacy. Moreover, music will automatically pause when the system suspends.

I suppose I am a silly guy but... I can not find where to disable this feature in KDE settings (I use Opensuse Tumbleweed, KDE Plasma 5.12.1.).

Thanks

Ok it is still buggy : https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389483
Fixed in next 5.12.2...

Now using KDE 5.16.4 and still no system settings options to disable this.