KDE Gains “Magic Monitor” Functionality With New KScreen

http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/12/kde-gains-magic-monitor-functionality-with-new-kscreen/

by glazemaster • 14 years ago

60 48 14 years ago

thepowerbase.com

ayi• 14 years ago

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

lewisreynolds2• 14 years ago

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.

kh_hk2• 14 years ago

  >> 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.

BinaryAcid• 14 years ago

Exactly why I stopped using Linux ten years ago.

kh_hk2• 14 years ago

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

pyre• 14 years ago

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!

haakon4• 14 years ago

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.

glazemaster• 14 years ago

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.

idm2• 14 years ago

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.

haakon4• 14 years ago

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).

shmerl5• 14 years ago

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

haakon4• 14 years ago

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.

lewisreynolds2• 14 years ago

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.

prakashk• 14 years ago

> [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...

CasimirCelerity• 14 years ago

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.

mistercow• 14 years ago

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.

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

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.

mgkimsal3• 14 years ago

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.

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

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.

truncate• 14 years ago

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.

michael_h2• 14 years ago

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.

anoother2• 14 years ago

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.

cbhl• 14 years ago

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.

jimux23• 14 years ago

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.

ori_b2• 14 years ago

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?

rogerbinns• 14 years ago

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.

aroman• 14 years ago

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!

eatporktoo• 14 years ago

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

foolano• 14 years ago

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 :)

frozenport• 14 years ago

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.

KDE Gains “Magic Monitor” Functionality With New KScreen

Related Stories