Geekoffee

Every so often I need my machine to stay awake: a long build, a big download, a presentation, or a terminal I’m watching from across the room. On macOS there are apps like Caffeine for this. On my openSUSE desktop it meant going into the power settings, turning things off, and then forgetting to turn them back on.

Geekoffee is the fix. It sits in the KDE Plasma system tray as a little coffee cup:

• Left-click toggles keep-awake on or off.
• Right-click opens a menu with Keep awake and Quit.
• Hover shows the current state.

While it’s on, the screen won’t dim or lock and the PC won’t go to sleep. When you switch it off, your normal settings take over again.

How it works

The key design decision is that Geekoffee never changes your power settings. Instead it asks the desktop politely over D-Bus to hold off for a while, using two standard freedesktop APIs:

Switching it off releases both inhibitors. And because the inhibitors belong to Geekoffee’s D-Bus connection, if the app quits or crashes, the session bus cleans them up automatically, so your PC can never get stuck awake. While it’s active it also shows up in Plasma’s own Power and Battery applet, which explains why the machine isn’t sleeping.

Under the hood

It’s a small, single-binary Rust app:

• ksni for the StatusNotifierItem tray icon and menu
• zbus on a Tokio runtime for the async D-Bus calls
• resvg to render the embedded SVG coffee cups into tray pixmaps, so there are no image files to install
• A release profile with LTO and stripping to keep the binary small

Install

You’ll need a Rust toolchain. Then:

cargo build --release
install -Dm755 target/release/geekoffee ~/.local/bin/geekoffee
install -Dm644 geekoffee.desktop ~/.config/autostart/geekoffee.desktop   # start on login

The README has the full steps, including the app launcher entry and how to uninstall. Geekoffee is free software under the GPL v3.