HP laptop: when I close the lid the screen locks. How do I disable this behavior?

I went to Settings>Privacy. It says Screen Lock Off

How can that be? If I close the laptop and then open it again, I find a screen showing the date/time in big characters. Then I press the Esc key and now the system prompts me to enter a password (by the way it does not say if it is the root password or the regular user password; I tried with both but it rejects both!). And it shows a button with 'Unlock' written on it! So it has locked the screen despite the fact that Settings>Privacy says Screen Lock Off.

EDIT: This is Ubuntu 18.04.

3 Answers

Open your settings dialog - select "Privacy" on the left side, then "Screen Lock"

Now turn off the "Automatic Screen lock" and "Lock Screen on suspend"

Turning off both worked with my hardware.

I am using elementaryOS Hera 5.1 which is built off of Ubuntu, so I am not sure if your settings will be identical, but as you can see I have an option that says when lid is closed: suspend which when I enter the administrative password, I can set to do whatever I want. This was in System Settings > Power. If you do not have this setting let me know.

This is a screenshot. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx