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I need to install a new Linux/Gnu OS soon. The present one, Linux Mint (Mate) Debian edition no longer fills my needs. I run 4 screens with 3 X sessions. Mate worked great for this, then an update broke it to one screen. I tried Cinnamon but it won't even start on multiple X sessions. XFCE works but with some serious drawbacks although that may be caused by my current system. Enlightenment actually worked well until it started crashing and I had to restore the settings file. When it finally crashed so nothing got it to run again I gave up on it.
I need a OS with multimedia support, the ability to install programs that may not be in the repositories ( Mythtv ), and multi X screen support. I am also looking for a file manager that has something like Gnome scripts. I have fair command line skills. I presently have Nvidia cards but I will go shopping if I have to. I might try Xinerama but I usually watch one screen while switching the other 2's desktops. Also not having a menu on all screens would be a pain.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MadTinfoilHatter on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:30AM (10 children)
I've had a situation where I wanted to run 2 X screens (1 for my monitors, 1 for my projector) and found that virtually all modern desktop environments are completely worthless at handling this. It seems that they seem to think that "We have xrandr now, X screens is old school and deprecated so we don't need to support that." Unfortunately xrandr isn't the endlösung to everything multimonitor. It's quite nice as long as the applications play nice with it, but a RPITA when they don't, and decide to open up a window (or even worse, a dialog or popup) on the projector. No. I do not want to turn on the projector, wait a minute for the screen to brighten, just to be able to locate your dumbass popup. >:-( I recall GIMP being a particularly nasty program to use in this respect.
Anyway, to answer your question, I found that:
1) The best distro for trying all this stuff out was Gentoo, simply because if you can't configure it in Gentoo, you can't configure it in any other distro either. (Xfce worked decently well with 2 X screens, after some fiddling, if I recall.)
2) Even in Gentoo nothing really worked well enough to make me satisfied - I ended up using KDE + xrandr, because KDE at least offers a tiny desktop "minimap" which allows you to drag offending windows to the right place, without actually seeing them. This may or may not be enough for you - it was the least bad compromise for me.
3) If 3 X screens are an absolute must for you, you may need to be prepared to ditch anything that calls itself a desktop environment, and go back to plain old window managers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:25AM (1 child)
You find it unfortunate that xrandr doesn't kill everything multimonitor?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Arik on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:52AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:15AM
I currently have 3 monitors and usually a window opens on the wrong one only if my pointer is on the wrong monitor when the window is created (and there aren't any rules for it to go to a specific output or workspace).
Except Cura which, after being open for a while, will open its menu at 0+0 on another monitor to the main window until the window is floated and then unfloated, where it will work normally for another 24 hours or so..
I even used to have 5 monitors with minimal "wrong monitor" issues. Perhaps the key here is the window manager, which has been i3 for both situations for me.
Also, any reason you weren't turning off the projector output in xrandr while the projector was off?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @01:35PM (1 child)
FYI, I've done multiple X screens with Awesome, seemed to work fine. Note the common link between this and another reply's suggestion of i3 -- they're both (primarily) tiling wms.
Now I'm not sure a tiling wm is what you want, but there's a correlation between using X screens and using tiling wms, so you're more likely to find it working properly there. If you really don't want a tiling wm, maybe try some old-school wms like FVWM2; I doubt that's been taken over by CADT [jwz.org] yet.
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:20PM
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:41PM (4 children)
The whole projector thing irritates me. I've always thought that a projector or any other similar display output, regardless of OS, should NEVER be part of the desktop. Ridiculous. It should be its own thing, never to be grabbed by anything except one application that writes to it.
That said, I've used some presentation software that seems to take full control of the projector output such that nothing else will show on it (no mouse, nothing), so I'm glad someone figured that out.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 26 2019, @07:23PM (3 children)
And how shall the computer figure out that the display device you just connected is a projector, rather than a monitor?
Not to mention that treating the projector specially would mean that you can only ever use programs with it that are specifically written for that purpose. Oh, you want to watch a YouTube video over the projector? Too bad that your browser has no projector support. Oh, you want to demonstrate your new program to the audience? Well, better add projector support to it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday November 27 2019, @12:04AM
Quite a snide response, going down a path based on an incorrect assumption.
Please show me where I said it has to be hard-wired or hard-coded, never to be changed?
It's simple- there should be a setting in the OS to let the USER decide on how the port is used.
And maybe you're not aware, but there is communication between the computer and display device, including good old VGA. So there could be a mechanism that recognizes the display type, and either autoconfigures or allows the USER (remember that person?) to choose.
I know, mindboggling.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday November 28 2019, @03:29AM (1 child)
I re-read my earlier post and I see where you misunderstood. I'm going through a lot of stress- my father passed away 10 days ago. I surely did not mean that a secondary graphics port should _never_ be used to extend a desktop. I just meant I think it's stupid that it is either a desktop extension, or unusable. There should be an option to use it as a desktop extension, or reserve it for special software, like video and slideshow projectors, or some other large-screen display. That way you never have to worry about an OS windows popping up either on a live screen, or worse, on a screen you can't get to because the resolution is out of range of the display on that port... but to change the resolution, you have to interact with that user interface widget. I've had to blindly grab around until I could find and drag it to the usable screen. Hope that makes more sense.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 28 2019, @07:32AM
Yes, that way it makes more sense. But I think this should be possible by using the X multiple screen feature (that was in X11 since the very beginning, although for a different purpose), although I never actually tried. You'd assign your main screen to :0.0, and the other screen/projector to :0.1. The window manager would run on :0.0 only (thus all those windows would open up there). The special software would then in addition to :0.0 explicitly open the display :0.1 and open a single full-screen window there.
What is missing is the specialized software doing that. I think it would not be hard to write, but nobody saw the need doing it. And of course, you'd have to set up everything manually (direct editing of configuration files), as no tool I know of supports setting this up.
I'm also not convinced that sufficiently many people would want to use this configuration in order to write that specialized software or support that type of setups in the setup tools.
But then, maybe it's just a chicken-egg problem: Nobody writes software using such a setup because nobody has such a setup anyway. And nobody has such a setup because the software supporting it doesn't exist. And of course the graphical configuration tools don't support it because nobody uses that setup anyways.
My sympathies about your father; I know that situation.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.