Screen Blank does not work

General Help
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Hey there everyone ! I've been using Zorin 17.3 for two months now, and overall I'm loving it. There's only one slight issue I can't seem to find a fix for : my screen never goes blank when i'm idle (nor does it lock), even though Screen Blank setting (Settings/Power/Power Saving Options/Screen Blank) is set to 1 minute.

On the other side, although I typically leave Automatic Suspend disabled, it does correctly automatically suspend if I set it to, so I guess it's not idle state not being triggered or anything. Power Mode setting is set to Performance, but I tested with Power Saver and no change.

I looked around here and on other forums (like here or here), but never found my exact problem (except on this unanswered question ). I checked various gnome settings :

  • org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay returned 60, as expected
  • org.gnome.desktop.screensaver idle-activation-enabled was set to true, as expected
  • org.gnome.desktop.screensaver lock-enabled was set to true. I tried setting it to false since my end goal is to have a simple screensaver without locking out, but doesnt work in either case. I set it back to true.
  • org.gnome.desktop.screensaver lock-delay was initially set to 0. I thought it might be the root of the problem, but setting it to 60 does not change anything.

Some additional informations :

  • I have 2 monitors (Main is n°2, using DVI->HDMI, 59.94HZ, 1080p, Secondary is n°1, using HDMI->VGA, 60Hz, 1080p)
  • My graphics output are on a nvidia 3090, the CPU has no graphic option. I tested every driver available at some point to solve another issue, now the latest available are installed.
  • This is a Windows dual-boot, and both OS are on the same physical SSD drive

Do you have any idea what could be causing this ?

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I moved your post to general help, so that it receives more attention.

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NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers often override GNOME power management behavior, especially for screen blanking and DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling). These drivers are notorious for not respecting Gsettings, GNOME settings or Wayland/X settings. You may notice that launching nvidia-settings will give you a GUI panel in which to tweak and control much of Nvidia.

What we can try in simple terms can include testing different Nvidia drivers in addition to exploring nvidia-settings (Turning off Video acceleration or "Allow G-SYNC" or "Force Full Composition Pipeline")

But for a more thorough or complex solution, most of those are simply not available in Wayland (Xsettings, xrandr settings, etc) and we would need for you to be using X11 (Xorg) rather than Wayland.

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Thanks for the reply ! That seems the most probable lead, nvidia graphics have been one of the main source of issues for me.

Thanks for the nvidia-setting command, I wasnt aware of it. Sadly, as you said and since i'm using Wayland (maybe not, see edit below), there is just a few settings available (G-SYNC is marked as not available anyway, Force Full Composition Pipeline and Video Acceleration are not here). I tried to turn off OpenGL settings like "Sync to VBlank" and "Allow Flipping", but I'm not even sure those are actually getting in the way of Wayland, and they did not change it anyway.

I also tried some drivers : most recent ones, oldest ones, in-the-middle ones, both under the classic version and "open kernel" version, with no luck. I also tried the open source Nouveau version from X.org but it does not work at all (probably because it's made for X11 ?).

I tried using X11 : i'm not sure if this actually switches from Wayland to X11, i just checked the option "Zorin with Xorg" on login screen. No immediate change. I tried to disable Video Acceleration as proposed in this question (actually did both answers, and also made the first answer in the directory of the second since they seemed similar) : it seems to have indeed disabled hardware acceleration since there is no more graphics settings to set in nvidia-settings (and i can notice some laginess on GUIs), but it did not solve the Screen Blank issue.

Edit : i took for granted that i was using Wayland, but for having switched back from "Zorin with X11" to "Zorin with Wayland" and tried opening nvidia-settings with even less options than before, I think that i might have been using X11 from the start. The default "Zorin" option with nothing behind seems to be running X11 from what echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE tells, though i'm not sure if this is native or since i switched back and forth between X11 and Wayland.

For now, it's not a major inconvenience for me, so i'll probably keep things as they were, and just keep an eye open for news about nvidia drivers and such, and maybe redo some tests from time to time. I'll post here if i can find any improvements.

Thanks again for the answer !

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With Nvidia, even though Zorin OS defaults to Wayland, it may default to Xorg for Nvidia users.

If no driver is affecting this, I would recommend sticking with the 570(DKMS) on the 3090 card.

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