A simple utility to launch another process while inhibiting Freedesktop.org compliant power managers and screensavers.
I've recently (at the end of 2023) switched to running Steam on Linux inside Flatpak. Playing games with a keyboard and mouse works great. Playing games with a controller also works fine, except there is one issue: Currently Steam unfortunately doesn't manage to tell my desktop environment (KDE) to inhibit power management (going to sleep) or locking the screen and/or starting the screensaver when playing with a controller.
Whatever mechanism is used to detect user activity doesn't care about my controller.
There is a convenient tool that ships with KDE: kde-inhibit which I wanted to use. However as stated earlier, I'm running Steam inside Flatpak and don't have access to it. I tried to get flatpak to allow access to just that binary but couldn't get it to work.
If you just want to use this tool as-is on your machine you'll need:
- A normal C/C++ build environment (compiler, linker, etc)
- CMake
- sdbus-cpp (I've tested this with version 1.5.0 and 2.0.0, which you can find here or likely in your Linux distribution packages)
This is a normal CMake based application, so you can build it as usual.
If you're using this inside Flatpak but outside the Steam Flatpak package (e.g., inside bottles) you'll need to ensure that access to the session DBus connection as well as "talk" permissions on org.freedesktop.PowerManagement and org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver is allowed.
Otherwise the package won't work (and most likely crash). You can grant such access using e.g. Flatseal or the "Flatpak Permissions" from KDE.
This utility is available on Flathub with the id com.valvesoftware.Steam.Utility.InhibitScreensaver.
You can install it as an extension to the Steam package either by running flatpak install flathub com.valvesoftware.Steam.Utility.InhibitScreensaver in your favorite terminal application or through a GUI if it supports installing extension packages.