Closing lid with external monitor plugged in sends system to sleep

[Chris Nolan]

On 17.04 I could close my laptop lid with an external monitor plugged in and the system would not sleep. After upgrading to 17.10 the system sleeps on lid close. If I boot with an external monitor attached, I can keep the lid closed and the system does not sleep, but if I disconnect and reconnect the monitor, the lid-close-suspend behaviour ensues.

This is not a problem with the 'Suspend on lid close' option - if I disable this option, then regardless of whether an external monitor is plugged in or not, the system does not suspend. Furthermore, the gsettings options "org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power lid-close-suspend-with-external-monitor" and "org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power lid-close-ac-action" are "false" and "nothing" respectively.

This seems to be related to the closed bug #1716160. My gnome-settings-daemon version is 3.26.1-0ubuntu5.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. What video card and driver do you use? Does it happen in the session or only in gdm/on the greeter?

[Chris Nolan (cnolan)]

I'm running an Intel HD Graphics 620 (Kaby Lake GT2) (I believe the i915 driver), on a Dell XPS 13.

My apologies, I should have mentioned that this only happens in the session, not in the greeter. In fact, if I log in with the lid open and the external screen plugged in, I can close the laptop screen and keep using the system, but if I then disconnect the laptop from the screen, plug the screen back in, then close the lid, the system suspends (i.e. it seems to be a problem only once the system has been without an external monitor at least once since login).

[Fredrik Blomqvist (fgblomqvist)]

I have this exact same issue. If I turn off suspend on lid close in the Gnome Tweak Tool I have sometimes been able to close the lid without issues (as in, the laptop monitor turns off and the external one blinks black for a second, cursor still visible). Since a couple of days back, that stopped working as well (it worked for at least a few weeks before then). If I close my lid now, the laptop locks and my external monitor turns off. The only way to get out of the state is to open the lid, upon which I am presented by the login screen.

I am using my onboard Intel graphics (combined with bumblebee and the dedicated Nvidia card, but clearly Intel is the active one when this happens).

Has there been any progress on this?

[Jeremy LaCroix (j-jlacroix)]

Same issue here, on a Galago Pro laptop with an external monitor connected via HDMI.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 17.10 (artful) reached end-of-life on July 19, 2018.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

We appreciate that this bug may be old and you might not be interested in discussing it any more. But if you are then please upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version and re-test. If you then find the bug is still present in the newer Ubuntu version, please add a comment here telling us which new version it is in and change the bug status to Confirmed.

[Chris Nolan (cnolan)]

Seems to be fixed in 18.04.