Aaron wrote a nice blog post about multihead in Plasma and mentions that "there are still some KWin issues" and he is right. I don’t expect these issues to go away in the foreseeable future. Multihead in KWin is unmaintained as long as I have been developing for KWin and considering the rather small amount of bug reports we get for multihead it seems to be not worth spending time on it. Sorry.
So if anybody wants to use multihead and thinks that he needs multihead (multi-screen and multi-seat are working fine), he would have to sit down and investigate what is working/missing in KWin. I assume that it is not much which needs to be changed – probably working around the Kephal issue mentioned in Aaron’s blog.
So if you test on the Plasma desktop changes, please also have a look into what’s missing in KWin and report it to bug 256242 (it incorrectly mentions multi-screen in the title).
=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo
I think the different terms need explanation. I have regarded “multi-screen”, “multi-monitor” and “multi-head” as interchangeable. Am I wrong?
yes, they are not interchangeable and there are many more confusing terms like xrandr, xinerama, twinview, mergedfb… It’s a difficult topic and I don’t think I would get it right 😉
I for one would be very interested in seeing someone at least trying to write an article trying to explain the terms and what-goes-where.
The reason for that is that I am currently using a one-monitor only setup but I’ve been thinking of adding another one but since I’m on unchartered territory here I have no way of knowing what to expect.
For starters, I have two graphics card in my computer. One integrated to the motherboard (Intel) and one in a PCI-e slot (nvidia). The intel one has one connector: a standard VGA-connector. The nvidia one has a VGA plus a DVI one.
If I plug both monitors into the nvidia one, what would that be? I’d guess multi-monitor, is that right?
But if one is plugged into the nvidia-card and the other to the intel one, that would be multi-head?
If so, what is multi-seat?
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=257315 is the only one that really affects me. I’ve been using multihead kwin since pre-4.0, and it worked just fine for my use-case. (2 screens in Xinerama mode, different resolutions)
2 screen in Xinerama mode is multiscreen, not multihead (yeah the terms are confusing). The bug you reported is probably out of scope for KWin.
http://nextsprocket.com/tasks/fixing-a-bug-in-kde-with-multiply-xog-runnings <- earn 200 doller on fixing the kwin problem.