Apparently when steam is running prevents any DPMS timers to actually
power down the display. I think this is might be considered a feature
in some situations where the display is supposed to stay on, but for
me steam keeps the display on when it is just minimized into the
system tray, so there is literally nothing that steam might show me
that would justify keeping the display from going into standby.

I used these steps to reproduce the problem:

* Steam is not running
* Run `xset dpms 0 0 5` to be able to quickly tell if dpms still works
  (it does at this point)
* Start steam and wait for it to minimize into the system tray (dpms
  still works)
* Open the steam library from the system tray
* DPMS doesn't trigger anymore

At this point DPMS doesn't trigger based on time anymore. Minimizing
steam doesn't make it work again. The only way I found to make DPMS
work again is to close steam completely.

Apparently this only affects time based DPMS. Using
`xset dpms force *` still works as expected.

I'm running steam in XFCE with xmonad instead of xfwm.

Debian does not have access to the Steam client's source code, so we
cannot change its behaviour. Please report issues in the proprietary Steam
client to <https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/>.

Thanks,
    smcv

Hi smcv,

thanks for the pointer! I just checked and apparently the issue was
already reported with the number 5607.

Regards
Sven


Am 25.09.19 um 23:14 schrieb Simon McVittie: