Mac OS X has had a smoothly fading, panning and zooming screensaver for years, and so has the Freeosphere, up to a point. GL Slideshow, part of xscreensaver, suffers from an annoying stutter between images, which sort of defeats the point of having smooth fading in the first place. The source code gives a detailed excuse as to why this happens, concluding that it can’t be done, except that Apple managed it somehow.

Now, all these years later, there is finally a solution: smoothslidesaver. The Ubuntu packages are out of date, but the Debian Unstable package installs on Ubuntu 7.10. It’s a KDE screensaver, so I’m not sure how you’d get it to work in Gnome, but there you go. It works.