Gnome on Arch "screen saver extension not supported"

[ilario]

Hi all!
I am on a regular and updated Arch installation and using SafeEyes I hit this issue:
slgobinath/SafeEyes#375
running directly xprintidle from the command line I get:

$ xprintidle
screen saver extension not supported

It could be an issue of XScreenSaverQueryExtension from libXScrnSaver
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libxscrnsaver

[g0hl1n]

xprintidle calls XScreenSaverQueryExtension() on the display specified in the DISPLAY environment variable to check if the XScreenSaver extension is available (which is required according to the man page: https://linux.die.net/man/3/xscreensaverqueryextension).
If that call returns false xprintidle exits with "screen saver extension not supported".

Therefore from my current point of view there's nothing xprintidle can do to fix that problem.
Any further pointers or info is greatly appreciated!

[ilario]

Ok.
Is there anyone else using Gnome+Wayland?
I don't think I am in a corner case, so I suppose this could be happening to many other people.
Am I the only one to see this message?
Which are the relevant software that could be involved in this issue?

My Gnome version is 3.38.1
My libxss (libXScrnSaver, provider of XScreenSaverQueryExtension) version is 1.2.3
My libx11 version is 1.7.0
My xorgproto version is 2020.1
what else could be relevant?

[g0hl1n]

@ilario any news on this issue?

[ilario]

Surely we need something that works both on X and on Wayland...
This works on my system (Gnome-specific solution):

dbus-send --session \
          --dest=org.gnome.ScreenSaver \
          --type=method_call \
          --print-reply \
          --reply-timeout=20000 \
          /org/gnome/ScreenSaver \
          org.gnome.ScreenSaver.GetActive

There are some more pointers here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/197032/detect-if-screensaver-is-active

[ilario]

Better: something like a "wprintidle" should be created instead. And xprintidle can continue to be working only on X11.

[g0hl1n]

If you plan to implement something like a wlprintidle I would recommend also looking at https://github.com/swaywm/swayidle.

As this is no longer an issue concerning xprintidle, I'll close this issue.
Thank you!

[xinthose]

Issue exists on Ubuntu 22 which uses Wayland now.

[g0hl1n]

Ehm, yeah. Wayland doesn't support the X screen saver extension 😉
See comments above on a short discussion about 'wlprintidle'.