So I'm not even sure whether this was due to steam lacking the feature on linux or op's system being somehow misconfigured, yet I noticed a post in /r/linux_gaming explaining how steam's status wouldn't automatically be set to Away after the user left his computer for a while, resulting in the op's friends holding a grudge on him for not replying.

Now, I've never truly had a mind to test whether that was the case on any of my systems and I probably wouldn't care to fix it either if that was the case, but after noticing the thread on reddit (yeah, don't judge by by the way, it's only 2 linux subreddits :P) I got anxious and decided to write a fix for it, so [here](http://hastebin.com/ohidagulap.vhdl)'s my script for anyone that might possibly need it.

How it works: It's basically a while loop checking whether the inactivity time of the user in the current Xsession exceeds a set amount of milliseconds (which can be easily modified to suit the user's needs in the beginning of the file among other settings). If that's the case it will set the steam user's status to Away using steam's protocol. When the Xsession wakes up it will set the status back to Online.

There's a sleep delay (in seconds) in the end of the loop included in order to minimize system usage due to countless useless repetitions of the loop. You could modify it to whatever you like, just make sure it's lower than the inactivity setting value and not too big either (if the while loop isn't repeating fast enough it will also increase the delay between your getting back to the desktop and your steam status being set back to Online), default value is 15 (secs). Additionally, the script will check whether there's an instance of steam running before it tries to do anything so steam won't automagically launch on its own (cause it likes to launch itself whether the action recuested justifies it or not...).

There's a status flag variable meant to deter the script from repetitively setting the same setting while there's no alteration in the user's activity in the x session.

In order for the script to work you should have a version of xprintidle installed. One that's not bundled with a while loop and outputting to stdout that is... had some bad lack with downstream in gentoo (wirelay overlay). xprintidle's upstream is dead so those things happen... Well, if executing xprintidle returns a single int value you should be good to go.

The script is a config/executable hybrid since there's not enough variations of the desired outcome to justify a separate config file or shell parameter arguments, meaning that there are 2 (actually 3) things you might have a mind to change in the script without modifying it and they're both defined as variables in the top of the file. Just place it somewhere, chmod +x it and launch it on startup through a startup script file or however you wish.

I'd appreciate any feedback regarding it :)

edit: While the script is only meant to switch steam's status to the appropriate mode, by default, it could easily be modified to include other cron-like jobs based on a single Xsession inactivity status.
This is precisely why I'm utilizing a flag, executing an if/else block bundled with everything on each repetion would be both resource consuming and problematic for a lot of cases.