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Comment by zachruss92 | Hacker News Reader

This is exciting! Coincidentally I have been messing with 17.10 the past few days, and I think it'll solve my display issues with a 3 monitor setup (with one 4k in the middle). That means I can finally be done with SSHing into a linux VM from windows when I want to do development on my gaming PC :)

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What sort of issues were you having?

I haven't kept up with the goings-on in this release, but I was quite excited to see so many clamoring for resolutions to pains involving multi-monitor setups in a previous discussion[1]. I would be interested to see what of those pains have been fixed.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821

I understand that you can't demand the same things from a non-profit ecosystem like Linux like you can from Windows or MacOS, but that being said the lack of good support for multiple monitor setups is infuriating. I've tried to get a "Laptop HTPC" setup working several times and it always takes a bunch of ugly hacks to even make it usable -- and you can forget about doing any of it in any kind of GUI, most of the time that will even make things worse.

multiple monitor support? you mean like 6-8 monitors? or just 2-3? I have been using ubuntu for 2-3 monitors setup for 10 years, never had any real problem.

X11 has supported multiple monitors for 30 years

Yes, it supports multiple monitors in limitless arbitrary positions. If you want a monitor to the right hand side, one mounted behind you and one above you then you can configure this.

However if you want three monitors lined up side by side, this seems to be ridiculously hard to configure at least in Ubuntu. The monitor drag-drop interface in Ubuntu is the worst I have ever seen. We recently had three new hires and had to go through the traumatic experience of setting this up for each of them.

man xrandr

To expand on this, you can easily do something like:

xranrdr -d :0 --output VGA-2 --right-of VGA-1

xranrdr -d :0 --output VGA-3 --right-of VGA-2

That would line up your three monitors in a row. I've been using it to automate testing of a multi-window Electron app and it works very well. You can do grids, columns, a cross - whatever...

Sadly Gnome is a confounding variable in all this.

They have decided that they will only do whole number scaling, and Unity (up to 7, Unity 8, now a community project, was to be based on Qt) is based on GTK/Gnome.

Frankly the Linux DE have been crapifying every size the DEs (Gnome in particular) figured they knew better how to do the underlying stuff than X11.

Extension for using multiple monitors as one big monitor, Xinerama, came out in 1998.

If I plug a display into my laptop, the screen switches over but everything is scaled wrong and glitchy. When I remove it... it never brings my original display back--essentially bricking it.

::sigh::

I've never once had a problem like that in Windows and I literally switch my display back-and-forth in Windows 7 at least 3 times a day as I move around.

Are you running a X session or Wayland?

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