Increasing the screen saver delay on ubuntu 17.10

Question

The max screen saver delay on Ubuntu 17.10 seems to be 15 minutes. Is there a way to increase to say 45 minutes?

Answer 1

You should be able to do this using the following command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 2700

Alternatively you can install dconf-editor and use it to browse to this value and set it, if you prefer a GUI approach.

After settings this, the gnome settings dialog will list a value of "never" for this key. I haven't tried waiting for 45 minutes to see if it indeed does what one would expect.

Side note

How did I find out? I dumped my current gsettings using the following command:

for s in $(gsettings list-schemas); do for k in $(gsettings list-keys $s); do echo -n "$s/$k: "; gsettings get $s $k; done; done >gsettings.1

Then changed the setting using the gnome settings dialog. Then ran the command again, but replace gsettings.1 with gsettings.2, to dump again the settings into another file.

Afterwards I could use diff like this to see which key was changed:

diff gsettings.1 gsettings.2
1883c1883
< org.gnome.desktop.session/idle-delay: uint32 900
---
> org.gnome.desktop.session/idle-delay: uint32 600