Many moons ago, in a job role nothing to do with me anymore, I was tasked with looking at running/building some software on Linux, the distro wasn't up to me, nor was the installation, one of the key things was that I couldn't have root on this machine, it was all set up by the IT department, hosted on one of their servers.
Fine and dandy, in fact I was all happy about this as it was far less for me to worry about... Or so I thought.
You see, I expected to be handed an ssh account and IP (or name) to connect to... And this is where the wheels came off, for the IT guy had no idea really about running a linux VM and it just being a terminal session, he'd installed a full on desktop (XWindows running KDE I think).
This first project lead onto a second, which itself required some OpenGL, no problem the machine has a desktop running I can use the reference (Mesa) implementation and yeah it worked.
About a week later though the IT guy said that this VM was taking a whole CPU core on his server. Not really my problem, I'm not the host, and I'm not actually using it right now.
He reboots, the problem goes away.
Next day, same deal "your machine it taking up a whole core".... I was a little exacerbated about this, because really the machine wasn't mine, I knew nothing about it, not how it was set up, not about any of the items he'd installed, to me it really was just a remote desktop I opened in order to open a terminal... and I wished it was a totally headless machine, but he really didn't seem to realize this.
So, fast forward another day, and the IT guy comes over, he has figured out what suddenly made the machine, when not in use, go to 100% on one of his CPU cores..... Drum roll please.
Not only a screen saver, but a 3D OpenGL screen saver.
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