Comment 10 for bug 554069

I agree with Mario and Cody: installing xscreensaver should configure itself to autostart.

It seems that if a user uses KDE screensaver, it is useless to have the xscreensaver package installed. KDE can display xscreensaver "hacks" too, with the help of kscreensaver-xsavers* packages, but this only requires xscreensaver-{data,gl}{,-extra}, not xscreensaver. So for these users, simply removing xscreensaver would solve the problem.

KDE users who have KDE screensaver disabled and want to use xscreensaver just need to install xscreensaver, if the package sets up the daemon to autostart.

Although removing or installing packages can take more time than deleting or copying a desktop file, the former approach seems more elegant to me.

The only missing "feature" would be the ability to keep xscreensaver installed but not autostarted. I think this would be less commonly needed (if kubuntu-desktop and ubuntu-desktop do not automatically install xscreensaver), and the user can still manually delete the desktop file to accomplish this. Or there could be a config file in /etc/defaults for whether xscreensaver is actually autostarted...

Currently XFCE might be "hard coded" to start xscreensaver, but that doesn't seem to be a good solution either.