Bug#1029473: gnome-session: Automatic Suspend should not be enabled by default

[Simon McVittie]

Control: retitle -1 gnome-settings-daemon: automatic suspend after 20 minutes is undesired by some users
Control: reassign -1 gnome-settings-daemon
Control: affects -1 + gnome-session
Control: tags -1 + upstream wontfix

On Mon, 23 Jan 2023 at 01:19:44 +0000, Witold Baryluk wrote:
> It appears in Power settings, Automatic Suspend is On by default (with 20
> minutes delay).

This is intentional and has been true for about 5 years (in particular,
this was already the case in Debian 11, and most likely Debian 10 as well).
The automatic suspend became the default in upstream commit
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-settings-daemon/-/commit/2fdb48fa>
which mentions that this behaviour is required by national regulations
for personal computers sold in the EU and USA (with no distinction made
between laptop and desktop systems).

Obviously Debian doesn't sell computers with Debian and GNOME
preinstalled, but it would seem inconsistent with our social/environmental
responsibilities if we disabled a power-saving feature like this by
default, particularly when that would make it illegal for third parties
to sell computers with our OS preinstalled in the countries where a lot
of our contributors are based, and doubly so during an ongoing worldwide
climate crisis and a Europe-wide energy shortage.

> I am on a desktop PC, always on, and have programs in a background that
> must run non stop or for many hours (i.e. data acquisition / monitoring,
> long running scripts, simulations, etc).

I would suggest using the system's built-in facilities to delay suspend
while running these tasks. If you wrap a long-running command like this:

    systemd-inhibit ./my-long-running-script

then that should prevent the system from suspending to RAM during these
long-running tasks. This is available in a default installation or on
live media (because it's part of our default init system).

> I also do not understand why Screen Blank in Power Saving Options is
> "Never". A default should be few minutes.

Blanking the screen is redundant with the default suspend-to-RAM: the
screen is always blanked and locked before suspending anyway. Of course,
if you adjust the settings to disable suspend-to-RAM, then it will be
necessary to change adjacent settings to match.

> suspend to RAM is often broken on computers I use

There is probably a kernel command-line option that can be used to
disable the ability to suspend-to-RAM, as a workaround for hardware where
the ability to suspend is present but non-functional, but I don't know it.

    smcv