GNOME, at least on Fedora 38 and on debian 12, will put your computer to sleep if the mouse and keyboard haven't been used for 15 minutes. This makes the rather rash assumption that a computer running GNOME is only doing GNOME things, and only for a person active at the console. There are many things for which this assumption is wrong. Here are some for my desktop computer: - I have a HexChat IRC client running. I want messages captured, even if I am AFK (that's IRC-speak for Away From Keyboard) - I run an SMTP server and I want to receive email all the time. - I run an SSH server so that I can SSH-in, for example, to read my mail - sometimes I do large software builds that take more than 15 minutes. - on occasion I've done long running calculations - I have cron jobs (Window has a similar policy. I've left a computer to do Windows Update (which can take hours!) only to find it had gone to sleep without accomplishing its task.) This change showed up unannouced in Fedora 38 and has created a hubub. I don't see a similar upset in the debian community. <https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/gnome-suspends-after-15-minutes-of-user-inactivity-even-on-ac-power/79801> <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2190021> If I look at machines in my family, this policy works for our notebooks but generally does not work for desktops. I don't think that this should be a GNOME function since GNOME doesn't know everything about a machine. It seems like a better fit with systemd. To suppress sleep (but only when on AC power) on Fedora 38, create a file "/etc/dconf/db/site.d/do-not-suspend", owned by root, and put in it these two lines, not indented: [org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/power] sleep-inactive-ac-timeout=0 Superstition: you probably need to reboot for this to take effect. That doesn't work in debian. If I remember correctly, this does: Note, you need to do this for user "gdm", the login screen, too. Check setting for $USER that might login at the console: $ sudo -u $USER dbus-run-session gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-ac-type 'suspend' Suppress sleep (while on AC power) for $USER: $ sudo -u $USER dbus-run-session gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power sleep-inactive-ac-type nothing