Arch Linux: inhibiting sleep triggered by lid switch

Sometimes I want to run long jobs overnight on my laptop, or even charge my phone while the laptop is closed in my backpack (getting USB to have power when suspended is another longstanding problem).

For quite a while, I tried different variations of gnome-session-inhibit and systemd-inhibit. But they never worked properly!

Finally, I found this gem on the Arch Linux forum: Systemd-inhibit doesn’t prevent sleep

Turns out in /etc/systemd/logind.conf, LidSwitchIgnoreInhibited defaults to yes.

Uncomment the line, set it to no, and restart fixes the issue for me.

Note that after making this configuration change, you must restart your system.

Inhibit suspend

Then, either of these commands can be used to inhibit sleep:

systemd-inhibit --what=sleep --mode=block sleep inf

gnome-session-inhibit --inhibit suspend --inhibit-only

The first talks to systemd-logind at the system level, the second talks to the GNOME session manager. Both achieve the same result on a GNOME desktop, but systemd-inhibit is more portable across desktop environments.

Inhibit lock screen

To also prevent the screen from locking, add idle to the GNOME command (systemd’s idle inhibition doesn’t prevent screen lock):

gnome-session-inhibit --inhibit suspend:idle --inhibit-only