How to not show the clock screen when unblanking screen

I have the lock screen disabled and the screen goes blank after 10 minutes. When I return to my PC and move the mouse, the screen unblanks and I'm presenting with a digital clock display (time and date). I need to press a key to dismiss it (it's not a screen saver or the lock screen, so I don't know what to call it) in order to see my desktop.

Is there any way to disable this? When the screen unblanks, I want to see my desktop, not some other screen.

I'm using Ubuntu 18.04.


Solution 1:

  • Go to "Ubuntu Software" application.
  • Search for "disable screen shield".
  • Install it.

enter image description here

Solution 2:

[heavily edited, was wrong about some assumptions]

Ok so the gnome team seem to have eventually realized that the screen shield implementation of GDM 3 is an abomination. (indeed it is absolutely atrocious, without any doubt whatsoever).

And have started working on a replacement. When that is finally ready, they will be able to retire the old screen shield. And any features of it would be re-implemented (presumably from scratch, we would hope). And integrated into the new login screen itself, as a single element.

So no more separate screen shield. Getting in the way, causing a nuisance.

The place to look at this new development work, while it is ongoing, seems to be over here:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/276

[edit 2]

Unfortunately the new design still seems to make the screen shield a mandatory part of the login screen. This is not actually what we wanted. A good place to complain about this would be at the link above ^ (login required). Or on alan's associated blog page / article about the new login screen design / proposal.

Until / unless they change their minds, then I can only recommend people try switching over to a different wayland compatible display manager. Researching the competition other than GDM3, only SDDM currently supports wayland too. Which is the login manager for KDE Plasma. So installing this on a stock version of ubuntu could mess up your installation. Due to all it's other KDE dependencies. Therefore a fresh install of kubuntu from scratch is safer. Try out the Kubuntu Live USB / ISO Disk Image before switching.

[how i reached this conclusion]

A breadcrumbs trail of prior gnome3 bugs leading up to it. Since the gnome3 developers say they are not planning to fix the existing / current / old screen shield included in 18.04 in the meantime...

These bugs are listed in a reverse order, from new to old:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=720656

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=696330

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1049645

Solution 3:

I tried this gnome-shell-extension and it works for me:

https://github.com/lgpasquale/gnome-shell-extension-disable-screenshield