D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote on 2023-08-24 06:31:
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.
I would contend that automatic sleeping is not rash, but to be expected from the majority of users, especially on laptops, and especially newer users who a distro may want to avoid frustrating.
There are many things for which this assumption is wrong. Here are some for my desktop computer:
These tasks are all either advanced-level or server-focused, which most of the time won't even have a keyboard (i.e. VPSs).
I don't think that this should be a GNOME function since GNOME doesn't know everything about a machine.
I hate to defend Gnome devs, but they can't set defaults that will work for 100% of users 100% of the time; they have to make some assumptions. Maybe even enabling telemetry for making informed decisions in exactly this type of situation. I'm gonna side with them here - I find it a reasonable assumption (although maybe 15 minutes is a bit too soon).
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
Now *that* is obnoxious if there isn't a method within the default GUI to easily change this behaviour!
That doesn't work in debian. If I remember correctly, this does:
Also obnoxiously obtuse. Is there really no way to tweak this in the GUI? I trust you would've found it were it easy, so I'll chalk it up to another reason to (personally) stay far away from Gnome. Cheers, rb