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KDE Multi-Monitor Control Getting An Overhaul
Multi-monitor support on Free systems has always been a pain (even after RANDR made it a lot less of a pain). GNOME2 had a great feature: you only had to configure a given pair of displays once and it would do-the-right-thing and remember their configuration. But if you wanted to mirror displays of different resolutions, you were out of luck. KDE handled the latter case, but infuriatingly enough doesn't remember or restore configurations like GNOME2 did, and worse yet requires manual intervention before disconnecting a display. But, now that's all changing: "As some of you might have noticed, display management in KDE is not really something we could be proud of. It does not work as expected, it lacks some features and it’s not really maintained. Time to change it, don’t you think? ... Alex has written the libkscreen library that provides information about available/connected/enabled outputs and notifications about their changes. He also intends to write a KDED daemon that would listen for these events and depending on connected monitors (every monitor can be uniquely identified by it’s EDID) it would load specific configuration. For example, docking your notebook into a docking station at work would automatically turn on a second monitor and place it left of the notebook screen (or whatever you configure the first time you do it). Undocking the notebook and connecting a data projector in a meeting room would automatically set clone mode etc. etc."
Additionally, the dock applet and monitor configuration UI have been overhauled allowing for quickly setting common configurations ("extend display to the {right,left,top,bottom}" / "clone") directly from the desktop, and direct manipulation of the monitor positions if you do end up needing to use the configuration program (article has a video and screenshots).
I've used multiple monitors with KDE for around six years now. Basic multi-screen functionality has been around for ages. They're improving it, not introducing it.
XFCE user here. 3 different monitors of different sizes. 2 different video cards. No Xinerama and no seperate X screens, so I can switch workspaces on the other screens individually. Others who would like Xinerama can have that as well. I have connected 4 monitors as well. I can line them up any way I like. e.g. with 4, ---, L, +, T, reversed T. Space in between or connected.
The limit in screens is pure hardware. Adding cards would mean the ability to adding monitors.
I will soon be adding a 4th monitor and am looking at adding another video card and 2 more monitors.
Yep, it does not work in KDE or in GNOME how _I_ want it to run in the 5 minutes I tried, because it seems that they both handle things as one big screen (in any order) and I want my separate X sessions. Otherwise that would be working too.
Screen-shot from an older setup. The image is from 2006. Two identical screens there. http://houghi.org/shots/dualscreen.jpg
I have been doing multiple screens since around 1998. All with GUI software to make it easy for me and no manual editing of xorg.conf. All in Linux.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Then again, DOS might be the very first use...
DOS did have multi monitor support from day 1, but not in the way we think of it today. You could combine a CGA card (or later EGA, VGA, etc) with an MDA (monochrome, text only) card. The idea was to use the MDA for high resolution (at the time) text and the CGA for low res graphics. Software had to be specifically written for it, but it was possible. Later, some DOS debuggers could use the MDA as a debug output separate from the main screen.