You can xfce4-power-manager instead of a screen saver.

You can use JoystickWake.

xset -dpms

should work also and to enable it again

xset +dpms

I have the same problem under Fedora with Gnome running under Wayland. Joystick wake looks good. I use a PS4 controller so my current solution is to occasionally touch the touch pad which counts as mouse movement.

Thanks for the answers!

I'll test out what you guys said, starting with JoystickWake, when I get the chance this weekend (when I'll be gaming with some friends). :)

P.S.
Sorry for the delay!

Caffeine is handy, though it doesn't track joystick input per se. Works with fullscreen games regardless.

Okay, so, I didn't even end up using JoystickWake, let alone the other potential solutions, because as I was reading the GitHub page of JoystickWake, I saw that I could use the "xscreensaver-command -deactivate" (without the quotes) command to reset the screensaver's countdown, so I just made a bash script with a for loop that keeps running the command a few seconds before the screensaver is to be triggered. (I used a for loop instead of a while loop because I want the screen to eventually lock, just in case I actually went away from the computer during a session with game pad use. Also, I prefer to only rely on stuff that's in the official repositories.)

Having said that, I wanted to again thank everyone for their comments. :)

P.S.
I had already tried Caffeine before making this post, but for some reason, it didn't work.

P.P.S.
Technically, the correct answer to this thread should probably be the JoystickWake post (since it most accurately fits what my initial post asked). I'll check if that works next week when I game again, and I'll mark that as the answer. (Sorry for the delay to my delay. :P)

Last edited by s8as8a on 8 May 2021 at 5:50 am UTC

Okay, so, I confirmed that JoystickWake works.

I think the default is that after 30 seconds, if another event is detected from the game pad, it restarts the countdown of the screensaver.

P.S.
For anyone that would like to know how to use it.

1) "git clone https://github.com/foresto/joystickwake.git"; (without the quotes) (at least until GitHub stops supporting cloning from HTTPS)

2) Use the cd command to go to the joystickwake directory.

3) "./joystickwake" (without the quotes) (The executable has the same name as the directory it's contained in.)

Last edited by s8as8a on 15 May 2021 at 5:05 am UTC

Or you can get joystickwake from the developer's own PPA if that works for you. Installing the package sets it to autostart, but you can override that in your DE's configuration.