The Idle Inhibition Service API allows client applications to inhibit a user's login session from becoming idle.

The service is usually implemented by the session manager, or another daemon running inside the user's session, and communicating with the platform software to avoid becoming idle, and the consequences of becoming idle.

This API was designed by GNOME and KDE developers with the goal of having a common way to inhibit idleness.

Depending on the user session software running, idleness can have multiple consequences, including, but not limited to:

Inhibiting idleness is supposed to stop all those actions from taking place, specifically in response to idleness. A user action asking for any of those states would obviously be acted upon witout delay.

Idle inhibition is achieved by the application calling an Inhibit method on a well-known D-Bus name.

Inhibition will stop when the UnInhibit method is called, or the application disconnects from the D-Bus session bus (which usually happens upon exit).

Implementations of this well-known bus name must have an object /org/freedesktop/ScreenSaver which implements the org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver interface.

The D-Bus service name, org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver, intentionally contains the word screensaver, as KDE implements the idle inhibition API in a screensaver sub-module. It was necessary for the specified Idle Inhibition Service API to be compatible with this existing software.

KDE's implementation until kde-workspace 4.11.8 lived on the /ScreenSaver object, not on /org/freedesktop/ScreenSaver as described in this specification. This is fixed in later releases.

For the same reasons, inhibition of suspend, hibernation, or user-switching (amongst others) is not supported in the API.