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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
[+] [-] haakon|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] idm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w1ntermute|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michael_h|13 years ago|reply
If there is a solution, it's not obvious to me.
[+] [-] jimux2|13 years ago|reply
Linux does a lot of things very well, but multiple monitors has always been a bit of a mess when fullscreened apps are involved.
[+] [-] mgkimsal|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] truncate|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eatporktoo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lewisreynolds|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CasimirCelerity|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prakashk|13 years ago|reply
Are you talking about the problem described in this post? http://askubuntu.com/questions/117127/flash-video-appears-bl...
[+] [-] foolano|13 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] mistercow|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] frozenport|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ayi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lewisreynolds|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aroman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BinaryAcid|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kh_hk|13 years ago|reply