KDE Gains “Magic Monitor” Functionality With New KScreen | Hacker News Reader

KDE Gains “Magic Monitor” Functionality With New KScreen

thepowerbase.com

60 pointsglazemaster48 comments

This is mostly blogspam for this: http://www.afiestas.org/screen-management-got-magic/

It's easy to be cynical about this, but I for one am very pleased about this development. So sorely needed. Perhaps in a small way it can help slow down the migration from Linux to Mac on the desktop.

Hardly blogspam, the source you cited is listed clearly as a source at the bottom of the article. It even gives credit to the referrer.

"John said Sally got a noew job, how do you feel about that Debrah?", "That's great." said Debrah. "I can't wait to tell Frank!" "Frank, John just told me that Sally got a new job!"

It also contains 200 words of original commentary as a lead-in, and the report is less 300 words in total.

Actually, the OP provided some context that helped. It's been a few years since I used Linux as a desktop - so I had forgotten all the x11 conf horrors. I appreciated the lead-in.

I use Linux on the desktop and I haven't touched an X11 configuration file in many years. I would have to Google for its location if I wanted to even look at it. Stuff just works now - except we don't have intelligent multimonitor support (until now).

The GNOME 3 "Displays" app is pretty good. You can toggle mirrored, external screen to the left or right by just dragging, etc. It isn't quite as slick as the one shown in the video, but it's certainly functional and easy to use.

KDE has the same thing, but it's not smart at all. It will pick the wrong resolution for the wrong screen, if I disconnect a screen the windows that were on it become inaccessible, it never remembers my setup when I re-dock the laptop, and so on.

It depends. For example if you use Nvidia driver and tools - they offer good and convenient multimonitor support out of the box. Without Nvidia it's quite messy, I agree.

Is there any major migration from Linux to Mac OSX on the desktop? Did you see any statistics?

It's just an impression from my own life. 3-5 years ago, lots of people around me used Linux. Many of these same people now use Macs. Not exactly scientific, I know.

Well, impressions of course can differ. I observe lot's of people moving from Windows to Linux, and never yet observed anyone moving from Linux to Mac OSX. But globally this probably doesn't mean much.

I did for what it's worth, for exactly this kind of reason. I needed my computer to just work so I could.

Surely it can depend on the computer and the kind of work you need to do. But I doubt there are any systems which "just work" for every single use case and scenario in the world. So if you found something that fits your particular needs (and wasn't achievable on Linux) - good. But for many use cases Linux is even better than Mac OSX. So it depends.

Of course you're right about the corner cases where somebody has particular requirements, but I'm also counted among the Linux-to-Mac migration. I couldn't afford the amount of time I was spending just to keep my desktop functioning, so I got a macbook. I run a dozen Debian or Ubuntu servers, but my primary workstation is a mac laptop.

Honestly, this article made me realize how much I take it for granted that all of the LCD projectors and dual-monitor setups I've encountered in the last half-decade have just worked with my mac. I thought back to 1999, when I got my first Xinerama dual-head setup working with X11 after about 4 hours of work...

xf86config? Oh the pain! One of the video cards was running at 50hz in 15-bit color mode. Madness.

I'm using "Nvidia X Server settings" tool for setting multiple monitors. Never had any problems with it on my Debian testing. And configuring system is usually trivial. How long ago did you stop using Linux for the desktop? If it was indeed around 1999 - then really, try again. Linux is not standing in one place.

I'm not sure why people are always complaining about multi-monitor handling on Linux. It's always worked just fine for me. With an open source graphics driver, there's RandR and various frontends for it. With any proprietary driver, you use their own UI for it.

People have a huge amount of trouble when using more than two monitors. I have two video cards and three monitors and I _just want to use all of them as a single desktop_. If I have two monitors, I can use TwinView and everything is great. When I add that third monitor, I have to use it as a separate xscreen, so it has it's own gnome panels and I can't drag a window over to it.

If there is a solution, it's not obvious to me.

Sounds like you're using the proprietary Nvidia driver?

Set all your screens to 'separate X screen' and then check the 'Use Xinerama' box. You may have to set the correct screen offsets in the Nvidia control panel (or xorg.conf) after restarting X.

I have this setup at work, and it works very nicely apart from the fact that only one of the two GPUs seems to be capable of displaying OpenGL content when connected in this way.

Yes, I'm using the proprietary drivers (for a variety of reasons, but CUDA support chief among them) and I had that exact setup for about five minutes.

Using Xinerama forces compositing off, which makes for a less than snappy experience. I have three Dell 3000wfp's and without compositing turned on, the tearing is more than noticeable. I might be able to tolerate it, but I know that it is capable of working nicely (a la TwinView).

> 'Use Xinerama' box

Xinerama is old, buggy and more or less deprecated at this point. Also compositing doesn't work with it enabled which causes other issues.

> Xinerama is old, buggy and more or less deprecated at this point

It is? What's the alternative?

Doesn't exist (yet). The intended replacement is multi-gpu support in xRandR but that feature has been pushed back release after release of xRandR for literally years now.

Does three monitors and two cards work fine under proprietary operating systems? I would expect symmetry at the least -- something like four monitors and two cards.

Setup has always been a very minor annoyance, but as a gamer who uses multiple monitors, Linux has been a simple no-go for me. I proselytize Linux everywhere, but is mostly just a development platform for me, because of this combination. I recently got on the Steam for Linux beta, and it's fantastic. But most games I have to play in windowed mode, and some I just can't play at all, because it spans across my two screens (with very different dimensions and resolutions). Sure, I could disable one monitor, but that's more trouble than it's worth, when I can still take advantage of my 2nd monitor just fine in Windows. In Windows, games only fullscreen on one screen, I can still see my gmail feed just fine on my second monitor.

Linux does a lot of things very well, but multiple monitors has always been a bit of a mess when fullscreened apps are involved.

I've found that's generally a program bug. When the programs try to find the root window, and create an OVERRIDE_REDIRECT window that covers the entire screen, they behave poorly.

They should be setting the EWMH fullscreen hint. To be honest, I haven't seen a program in ages that gets this wrong. Do you have any examples?

I'd have to get home and boot up Linux to try them out, but the ones coming to mind are Darwinia, Trine, and World of Goo. Is there a way that I, as a user, could manually set that fullscreen hint?

You could set the fullscreen hint yourself. The problem is that setting it on an override redirect window will do nothing, because override redirect exists solely for the purpose of telling the WM "Never touch this window." You would have to figure out how to make it use a regular window.

It's unfortunate. The mechanism to allow the WM to handle fullscreening intelligently is there, but it seems that the developers weren't aware of it.

Hmm, perhaps there could be another approach. Like lying to the certain applications about the resolution of the 'screen', to return the dimensions of the primary monitor, and then map coordinate 0,0 to the location we want the app to start at.

In addition to the display woes I find many of the games in the Humble Bundle grab all keystrokes. This means nothing happens when you press the volume keys, and most egregiously when you press Alt-Tab!

I've found things better when using Intel graphics than Nvidia. Of course no such problems on Windows at all on the same machine.

Perhaps mistercow's comment (right below yours right now) is just one example of why people are "always complaining".

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4973598

"It's always worked just fine for me"

Guess what? Even when things didn't work for me, I'd generally have people saying the same thing: "works for me - I dunno what your problem is". That's annoying, and also not helpful - yes, often you don't know why it works, so you can't help anyone else when it doesn't work for them.

Also, years of "works for me", coupled with "hey, now XYZ works!" in next releases (when - hey, it already supposedly "just works") are the sorts of things people "complain" about.

He's expecting support for high-resolution CRT monitors? I haven't seen one of those in at least 5 years. Given the limited resources available to the community, I'd say that's definitely not a priority. The next thing I'd like to see is better support for high DPI screens, not support for a decades-old technology.

However... CRTs were definitely standard for the more than a decade. During that time, many of the same people now saying "everything works for me" were also saying "everything works for me" with CRTs, and they clearly don't (at least in the GP post). And I don't think anyone went out of their way to remove/break CRT support in earlier versions - it was never quite there for everyone.

Essentially for me, and others I know, the trust in Linux on the desktop has been abused, and it'll be a while before I ever embrace it again as my day to day workstation (VMs and headless servers are where Linux has been relegated in my day to day work).

The problem with linux has always been that even if you're using the same version of the OS (kernel +userland apps) your hardware is likely to be different, and this breaks functionality for a lot of users

Im not saying that your problem was the same. Im just tryimg to illustrate that a lot of things can go wrong, and it isnt (always) that other users are lying about it

I'm not suggesting that they're lying, but saying "works for me" doesn't help. What's more, if they never had to 'make' it work - just worked magically - they've never even understood that it really truly doesn't work for other people - they think the other people are explicitly doing something wrong. But no, they're not lying - it's working for them.

I agree, for power users usually xrandr command is far more quicker than cycling through layouts.

One feature I liked here is not going to sleep when lid is closed. I think to avoid that in normal case would be to set power settings to "do nothing" when lid is closed whenever you want this feature.

I think that "Magic Monitor" oversells this. I expected something much more... magic...

If this works I'll be delighted. I've got an Ubuntu installation with three monitors and two graphics cards and I burnt untold hours of my life getting them all to work. Then an upgrade came along and broke them for good.

Of all the things that could be improved[1] on linux this would be my number one preference. Screen real estate is critical for development work and I have practically been driven back to Windows or Mac.

[1] A flash player that doesn't tint everything blue would also be welcome.

An fyi, the latest nvidia drivers fix the blue man bug. The bug was never on their end but rather adobe's, but the new drivers have a hack since adobe never got around to fixing it.

> [1] A flash player that doesn't tint everything blue would also be welcome.

Are you talking about the problem described in this post? http://askubuntu.com/questions/117127/flash-video-appears-bl...

This is great news.

I've been using a patch that I made to address this annoying issue in KDE for a year now:

https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/103356/

My patch was more of a hack than anything else but it did its job. I'm happy though that I won't need to patch every new KDE version any longer :)

This is definitely a step forward but my biggest annoyance with Linux and external monitors is handling CRTs that (apparently) send incomplete EDID information. With literally every CRT monitor I've used with Linux, the highest resolution option I've seen in the default popup is 1024x768, with the maximum refresh rate being the headache-inducing 60 Hz, regardless of the monitor's actual capability.

At least more recently I've been able to get xrandr to work so that I can add other resolutions myself, and then I can put them in a script to run on boot, but holy crap is that annoying. Windows and Mac OS X have no problem detecting what these displays support, but X has been dropping the ball on this for years.

aerosnap is a feature I sorely miss on Linux. I have been able to recreate its functionality for a single screen, but I have been unable to make it work correctly for a dual screen setup.

It seems that have multiple screens in Linux creates a drawing canvas that is rectangular in shape and it is not clear how to find out the more complicated 2 rectangle shape.

I would like to see this issue addressed.

what a magic in 2012. i'm impressed. </sarcasm>

Sure it's tardy, but it's also really useful, and it's nice to see Linux continuing to improve, no matter how slowly.

This isn't something that looks like magic, it's just something that will make users more productive and less stressed. That's the kind of advance we need more of.

  >> Sure it's tardy, but it's also really useful, and it's nice to see 
  >> Linux continuing to improve, no matter how slowly.

Not to be the nitpicker here, but this is hardly a Linux issue, mostly about implementation in different desktop environments (GNOME, Unity, KDE, ...).

Everything is already on sysfs and randr. It's up to environments to adapt these changes. Which is great, because each of them can implement the behavior in the way that makes most sense for their users.

This looks great! I've come to really rely on the "closed clamshell mode" that was shown off last in the video -- Macs have had this for quite a while now. But it's always really great to see some work being done in this field. Kudos to the developers and the sponsors!

Exactly why I stopped using Linux ten years ago.

You stopped using Linux ten years ago because of VGA output handling?

More like:

grumble grumble I hate Linux. <anecdote about a poor user experience>. No one at all should ever use Linux for any reason whatsoever!

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