Bug 105638

Summary:	How to retrieve user idletime value with Wayland? Is there something similar to xprintidle?
Product:	Wayland	Reporter:	DanglingPointerException
Component:	wayland	Assignee:	Wayland bug list <wayland-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description DanglingPointerException 2018-03-21 01:45:23 UTC

How would I go about getting the current user idletime?

With X desktop environments we have xprintidle tool bundled in with virtually every single distribution's repository which returns the current idletime on the desktop environment.

Is there a similar command possible for wayland or is there a tool available like xprintidle for wayland?

Comment 1 Pekka Paalanen 2018-03-21 08:05:43 UTC

I'm not aware of any Wayland protocol extension for this, and I'm not sure it belongs in Wayland either, because you could as well be working in a virtual terminal text mode, on Xorg, or any other system. You could also be actively using input devices bypassing the display server, in which case the display would not know the user is active - I suspect joysticks might fall into that category.

I think systemd-logind might maintain idle time information if it is told about user activity.

This is not to say there cannot be a Wayland extension for it. There could, if there is someone to put the good effort into it, and other people agree it's a good idea.


Why is this a bug report? Is this a feature request?

If you only had a question, please use the Wayland mailing list and close this report as not a bug.

The design discussion for a such feature cannot be had in a Bugzilla.

Comment 2 DanglingPointerException 2018-03-21 13:20:26 UTC

(In reply to Pekka Paalanen from comment #1)
> I'm not aware of any Wayland protocol extension for this, and I'm not sure
> it belongs in Wayland either, because you could as well be working in a
> virtual terminal text mode, on Xorg, or any other system. You could also be
> actively using input devices bypassing the display server, in which case the
> display would not know the user is active - I suspect joysticks might fall
> into that category.
> 
> I think systemd-logind might maintain idle time information if it is told
> about user activity.
> 
> This is not to say there cannot be a Wayland extension for it. There could,
> if there is someone to put the good effort into it, and other people agree
> it's a good idea.
> 
> 
> Why is this a bug report? Is this a feature request?
> 
> If you only had a question, please use the Wayland mailing list and close
> this report as not a bug.
> 
> The design discussion for a such feature cannot be had in a Bugzilla.

Well xprintidle works because of X which Wayland is replacing; thus the easy assumption that Wayland will provide similar functionality.

X idletime if I'm not mistaken is purely for the active desktop environment and not some virtual text terminal unless of course it is a bash window on the current desktop.

Apologies if this the wrong place to ask the question.  I'll try the mailing list.  Due note though that I would suspect that there are tens of thousands if not millions of linux desktop instances out there that use xprintidle in scripts.

Thanks for the time responding!

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