Screen power saves and goes off and desktop is lost on power up

[Duncan]

ianseeks posted on Thu, 02 Mar 2017 15:41:53 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Thursday, 2 March 2017 09:34:13 GMT René J.V. Bertin wrote:
>> On Thursday March 2 2017 09:20:25 ianseeks wrote:
>> >Just done a zypper dup and a new kernel and kdm was installed, i'll
>> >see how it works now.
>> 
>> I'd be curious to know what was changed in KDM and why.

> Nothing changed according to changelog in Yast for KDM.  And the problem
> still exists..

FWIW...

I had that problem this summer, but I was busy relocating and temporarily 
in a hotel at the time, and didn't have a chance to really trace it down 
as I wanted, and it seems to work properly again now, tho since I didn't 
have time to actually trace it down and I changed TV-as-monitors since 
then, it could just as easily be a different TV-as-monitor that works 
slightly different over idle-power-down as a change in code

I was and am on kde-frameworks and plasma git, so there's a fair chance 
you're running the released code now that was giving me that problem last 
summer.

After realizing that if I left firefox playing youtube, the problem 
wouldn't occur, and deciding that must be due to firefox inhibiting auto-
locking (but /not/ screen blanking and power-down), I did investigate a 
bit...

I ended up changing the xorg and plasma options so the screen didn't 
blank and the monitors didn't turn off (turning off the screen-blanking 
and screen-locking in plasma, and setting all dpms timeouts to 0/disabled 
in xorg.conf.d, simply setting dpms off didn't do it, plasma apparently 
turned it back on), and then used manual screen lock and/or poweroff when 
I wanted it, as a workaround.

Again, note that /manual/ lock and monitor power-downs didn't trigger the 
issue, only /automatic/ ones.  And automatic screen-blanking and 
powerdown, without the auto-lock, seemed not to trigger it either.  But 
manual locking didn't trigger it, so it wasn't just the locking.  Which 
was why I was a bit frustrated not to have the time to investigate it 
properly, and figure out exactly what was going on.

That was successful at working around the problem, but it obviously 
wasn't a fix.

And when I relocated out of the hotel to my new house, I damaged one of 
the big-screen TVs I'd been using as a monitor, so had only one for 
awhile.  Then I got another, my first 4K (3840x2160, 65-inch =:^), and 
reconfigured to use both it and the remaining 48-inch full-HD 
(1920x1080), and I've not had the problem since.  But I'm not sure 
whether it was the way the one I damaged handled auto-power-down compared 
to the new 4K and the other older one (by a different manufacturer), or a 
plasma or frameworks fix during that time, that eliminated the problem. 
<shrug>

Anyway, you can try the same workaround for now, disabling the automatic 
screen locking and/or automatic monitor blanking and powerdown, doing 
manual if you need to, and hopefully it'll work for you for the time 
being as well.  And hopefully it /was/ a code fix, and at some point in 
the future, a plasma or frameworks update will fix the problem for you as 
well.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman