Talk: GNOME suspends after 15 minutes of user inactivity, even on AC power

Ask Fedora
123

I’m with you on this. I use Rocky Linux for servers. I only use Fedora for desktops. I’ll never use Rocky for a desktop, nor Fedora for a server.

Those who dismiss any user input do not belong in user-facing software development. I’ve built systems for decades, and care about every opinion and perception of every user of any system I have helped build. Thus, I do not like to see your opinion being dismissed and hope that is not representative of the Fedora devs.

The #1 thing Fedora needs to grow is word of mouth advertising. They got a lot from me the past 4-5 years. But, after this change, while I’ll continue to use it and do the work around, I haven’t been able to recommend it to anyone and no longer speak in the countless discussions where people share their favorite distro. It’s really very simple. I recommend something I love that won’t cause someone else pain. I cannot recommend something that can cause someone pain, and this change caused pain. This definitely hurt word-of-mouth. Whether or not this impact to word-of-mouth outways growing from pre-installs is yet to be determined, and nothing but an opinion until then.

I think what most people, such as you, are asking is to have a positive outcome for BOTH loyal users and potential new users and not pit them against each other or tell one to go use a server, which for many of us is the same as telling us to quit using Fedora.

124

The nice thing about Fedora is that there are many spins and many ways one can customize it for their own workflow and desktop. There seems no way to define what is correct because as soon as that is attempted one approaches the fenced environment like microsoft or the hardware + software silo like apple. What is correct for my use may not be compatible with your use case.

One can define what they believe will fit the greatest number of users including making certain it can be certified as ‘energy star compliant’ or whatever passes for that, but attempting to make everyone use just one config is absolutely not what FOSS and Linux is about.

Linux in general and Fedora in specific are about being compatible with almost all hardware out there and having access to all the tools one needs to do what they may wish with the PC. Narrowing that down to “what is correct and what is supported” automatically has the potential to cut out some portion of the user base.

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125

The first paragraph isn’t completely wrong but it is a declaration of war against users. I think it needs to be nuanced.

The second paragraph is also alienating. One reason I use Fedora is to not be monitored.

Back to an earlier statement that essentially says machines are workstations or servers (and cannot be both).

The internet was designed as a network of peers, not servers and clients. Some of us remember this. Linux is the dominant OS for peers.

It turns out that services offered over networks are usually split into client and server processes. Note: not always: DNS servers are often clients too; SMTP servers are often clients too; bittorent servers are often clients too; IPSec nodes can be both.

A particular host on the internet can and usually does run a collection of server and client processes.

What does it mean for a host to be a server? Certainly not that it runs only server tasks: most are DNS etc. clients. Does it meant that it runs at least one server task?

I sure hope a server is allowed to have a graphical desktop environment.

If a machine runs at least one server task, can it not be a workstation? The workstation I’m typing this on runs an X server – oops. It also happens to run an SMTP server and an SSH server. These are perfectly reasonable things to do, even if they don’t match your prescriptive model.

I do think that sleeping machines that don’t need to be on is progress. I especially appreciate it on notebooks.

====

Is it really GNOME’s business to know if the machine is idle? All it notices is that the user hasn’t wiggled the mouse or typed a key for a period of time. It doesn’t know about server processes. It doesn’t know about unattended tasks like long builds, file transfers, backups. It doesn’t know about things that the user is observing without typing: IRC sessions, videos, instrumentation …

This seems like a job for systemd. Systemd has its fingers in all the pies. It knows if services are being offered.

Odd case: my browser tabs act alive all the time. (I hate that.) How and what can decide if such activity is unimportant and optional?

126

L.S.,

You make a good point, that being negative usually does not result in gaining cooperation from the opposing side.

My intention here is to point out that unless the Fedora Developers are able to gain insight into how the various use cases are impacted by the choices they make when adding new features, the product will not be as good as it could be. The mandatory power off s but one example of this failure to understand what some users want.

Preinstalled Linux/Fedora is a good idea, but it seems like only a very tiny minority of purchasers will care. I bought a System 76 laptop recently, but as a 25+ year Fedora/Red Hat user - starting with Fedora 5 or 6, I have seen the ups and downs of this project and have used Linux on my daily use system(s) for all of that time. Even for me, the choice of hardware always drove the choice, not whether a specific OS was installed. Maybe the corporate market will want Fedora pre-installed to avoid paying the Microsoft tax. In most cases, I bet even they will wipe the system and install an ‘approved’ image. So, the pre-installed Redhat idea is a straw man.

Thomasz - you are correct that developers decide how the software they develop should work. Ignoring user input, especially from loyal users that have helped increase Fedora’s market share is at the peril of developers. Why do you want to ignore what people say they want.

As to telemetry - NO THANKS! I do not want anyone spying on my usage. I will never allow this and block all telemetry packets if they cannot be disabled by user controlled settings. This is a Microsoft tactic, where the users become the product.

Fedora Developers - your users are talking - PLEASE listen.

127

Eric - thanks fr the support. I, too, have been writing software/firmware for more than 45 years. I have lead teams, groups and divisions. Listening to your customers makes a product successful, not listening is usually fatal to the product or the company. This has been proven over and over again in commercial software.

The Fedora model is interesting. Because no one pays money for Fedora, there is no real way to measure the utility of proposed changes by measuring the amount of money customers spend and no customer facing staff (salespersons) who provide feedback to developers. Instead, Fedora runs ‘open loop’ with little user input. The only way that any input is really integrated into the product is when a user joins the development team.

Like you, I can no longer recommend Fedora or RHEL because of the apparent lack of respect for user experiences by the Fedora Developers that has resulted in very bad upgrade experiences in recent releases. For me, the last three upgrades I did ALL broke the systems in ways that made it completely unusable. Not a good experience. Frankly, the only reason I stick with Fedora is that the other choices are even worse.

128

Was kind of annoying as it was interrupting my remote containers workflow after rebasing onto 38 (vscode into silverblue with all my dev containers)

Working for me:

sudo -u gdm dbus-run-session gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-battery-type  nothing
sudo -u gdm dbus-run-session gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-ac-type  nothing
systemctl reboot
129

That’s fine, and I support you. Just please patch 39 (or some update in 38) so that it counts remote sessions as activity and I think most of us should be all good.

130

The link you say provides a solution does not work on Fedora 38 Workstation. The menu that it shows is simply not in Power Settings and changing the daemons in the way described does change them but does not have any effect. Something more basic/underlying is at fault. I came to Fedora being sick of MS hijacking our PCs and having effectively the same problem where my minipc would simply sleep after 2 minutes EVEN IF I selected all power management options to Disabled. This is ridiculous I think. We should be in power on when and for how long we should have our PCs on. Period.

131

I am sorry Kamil but having tried everything on that link, Fedora 38 Workstation still has the same behaviour. Sleep after 15 minutes. It is so frustrating and ridiculous. I dumped Win11 yesterday for the same reason, only to come at Linux and face the same hijacking behaviour. It is simply unacceptable.

132

Try this then:

This helped me in F38

134

@kparal

TwoThree requests, regarding the original common-issues posting: Could you please…

  1. Separate the input from the output, in the first sudo command line, so that users can copy/paste the command text with a simple click/tap?
  2. Remove the shell prompt ($) at the front of the command, for the same reason?
  3. (Optional) wrap the long command lines with backslash continuations.

e.g., something like:

Adjusting the login screen

If you want to modify the login screen behavior, you can display the current login screen settings with a command like this one:

sudo -u gdm dbus-run-session gsettings list-recursively \
org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power | grep sleep

Which will output a listing like this:

org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-ac-timeout 900
org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-ac-type 'suspend'
org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-battery-timeout 900
org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-battery-type 'suspend'

The sleep-inactive-ac-timeout is the Plugged in option and sleep-inactive-battery-timeout is the On Battery Power option. The number is the delay in seconds. You can configure the values like this:

sudo -u gdm dbus-run-session gsettings set \
org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-ac-timeout 1800
Thanks!
135

Uhh, OK. I really think this is not worth the energy, but since you already spent it, I edited it :slight_smile: Except breaking the lines, I don’t like it in general (there’s a button to display it in full, if needed).

In general, I don’t want to split everything into “this is the command” and “this is the output” parts. It’s longer and and harder to follow. The dollar sign as prompt is well-established and probably everyone who’s able to read a common issue and make sense of it understands it as well. Copying a first line is not difficult either, triple click, paste, remove a dollar at front. At least it makes every command execution intentional. So I don’t think I’m going to do this in my future guides by default, except in some cases where it really makes sense.

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136

I’d rather see the prompt character (#, $, or %) without sudo. The # indicates the command needs to be run with root privileges, and there are several ways to get root privileges (including su, sudo, and doas) or a shell prompt so I know whether bash or zsh is used.

Experienced users have a preferred way to run a command with root privileges, while encouraging copy/paste without thinking about the required privileges is a trap for inexperienced users. I work with a couple specialized packages intended to be installed with normal user privileges. One of the most common sources of failed installs is new users putting a sudo in front of the installer command because every installation they have seen starts with sudo.

137

Hello guys!

On my Fedora system, it automatically enters suspension if it remains at the login screen without a user logging in after a few minutes. However, once logged in, if the session locks due to inactivity, it doesn’t suspend at all.

How can I configure Fedora to prevent automatic suspension before any user logs in?

138

Just see the link in the very first post in this thread.

139

Except these commands aren’t intended to be run as root. They’re executed (via sudo) as the gdm user. There are very few alternate ways to do that, given that you can’t log in to the gdm user account or get a login shell running as gdm, since its /etc/passwd entry uses the /bin/nologin shell.

They’re also queries which make no changes to the system, meaning they’re as safe as can reasonably be expected.

Including a shell prompt character just means that users have to edit the command before they can execute it. I get the argument that this is a good thing… I just don’t agree with it. It’d be nice if having to edit a command line to remove a leading $ (or # or what have you) made the user read the whole command and consider what it’s doing. I’ve just seen no evidence that’s the case.

So, what you’re saying is, if the users had just copy-pasted the command lines exactly as provided, this wouldn’t have been a problem? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

All kidding aside, I don’t see how making it convenient to copy-paste commands would worsen the problem you’re talking about. Or how not including sudo in commands that do need it (especially when, as in this instance, it’s not just a shortcut for “run this as root”) would lessen it. In fact, exactly the opposite.

(The reason I suggested wrapping the long commands was to encourage users to actually read the entire command they’re copy-pasting. In my experience, if something has to be scrolled to be read, but can be copy-pasted without scrolling, whatever’s offscreen won’t be looked at.)

140

It would be nice if gnome apps that require not sleeping should disable it. Disk utility when zeroing out a disk kept going to sleep. had to stay at my desk for the whole hour it was writing zeroes to keep my laptop awake… at least on the live CD, the power settings menu is very limited.

141

Did you try if this works with the live iso?

I mean to execute the commands in the terminal before running disk utility?

142

That is quite serious. Can you please file a ticket at Issues · GNOME / gnome-disk-utility · GitLab and link it here? Thanks.

143

Sure I filed here Laptop tries to suspend while gnome-disk-utility is zeroing out a disk (#316) · Issues · GNOME / gnome-disk-utility · GitLab

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