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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).
In other news, readers demand to know when Slashdot is getting getting an editor.
You're supposed to know how to hack your xconfig with vi. Setting up two displays is supposed to hurt.
:wq
I'd like to see more vanilla versions of this software. Open Source Software has become almost as bad as the commercial counter parts in wanting to wrap everything up as one big GUI package. I don't want a bunch of bologna to download and run to configure dual monitors if I want to use a very lightweight window manager, or setup an embedded solution such as a kiosk.
/optional/ GUI front end over this junk any day.
One of the original and cool ideas of open source was to allow hackers to dive into the utilities and do really cool things with them that they aren't meant to achieve. A multi monitor control system that is tied into a blob of libraries doesn't sound appealing to me. I'll take a 32KB application that has an
Sig: I stole this sig.
And here Windows 7 handles five monitors using three different resolutions flawlessly. Thanks to Ultramon, they line up seamlessly in spite of also being different sizes and being at different physical elevations. It's one of the more major things that has kept me on Windows - I look forward to Linux being able to do the same.
Windows XP did multi-monitors fairly well. Windows 7 handles it excellently. I have five monitors and when replacing one of the video cards, I changed which monitors were plugged into which card. As soon as Windows 7 booted, it automatically corrected for switching the cables around so that the monitors were all exactly as they were when I powered down the system in spite of every monitor being plugged into a different card and port.
Not to say Win7 isn't lacking some features, but nothing free or cheap software like Ultramon doesn't fix (IE: fine-tuning relative positions, multi-monitor wallpaper, taskbar across all monitors), but the essential parts of multi-monitors are handled very well.
They waste all these time mucking with icons, reorganizing menu accesses, and other such superfluous "human interaction" nonsense, but never got around to supporting something as basic as multiple displays.
It's why you're better off to wait for jesus to return than the mythical "year of linux desktop".
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.