I would like to know if I am the only one seeing this, but since upgrading to Sonoma, I can no longer control screen savers with AppleScript or Terminal.
This used to work:
tell application "System Events"
start current screen saver
end tell
and now has no effect. Moreover, this used to work:
tell application "System Events"
set current screen saver to screen saver "Drift"
end tell
and now results in this error:
System Events got an error: Can’t set screen saver “Drift” to screen saver “Drift”.
If I try to set it to a third-party screensaver:
tell application "System Events"
set current screen saver to screen saver "Hexadrop"
end tell
…it fails silently, without any error. (Hexadrop is one of the savers in the wonderful XScreenSaver.)
Is anyone else able to replicate any of this? I need a sanity check before I submit feedback to Apple.
By the way, I have also tried using defaults write in Terminal:
defaults -currentHost write com.apple.screensaver moduleDict -dict moduleName -string 'Hexadrop' path -string '/System/Library/Screen Savers/Hexadrop.saver' type 0
and then
killall cfprefsd
and that used to work, too, and no longer works for me. The plist changes, but it has no effect whatsoever on which screen saver actually runs.