On Monday, 21 November 2022 18:12:41 GMT Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2022-11-21, Michael <confabulate@kintzios.com> wrote:
> > On Monday, 21 November 2022 16:50:14 GMT Grant Edwards wrote:
> >> On 2022-11-21, Michael <confabulate@kintzios.com> wrote:
> >> > On Monday, 21 November 2022 16:11:13 GMT Grant Edwards wrote:
> >> >> I did have to give up the option of having multiple X11
> >> >> screens. The proprietary NVidia driver supported multiple screens,
> >> >> but the drivers for built-in Intel and Radeon drivers don't seem
> >> >> to.
> >> > 
> >> > AMD APUs with embedded radeon graphics work fine here with two
> >> > monitors (DVI + HDMI ports).
> >> 
> >> Yes, multiple montors work fine with both Intel and Radeon embedded
> >> graphics with Xorg drivers.
> >> 
> >> It's multiple X11 screens that isn't supported.  An X11 screen is the
> >> entity that's managed by single window manager and comprises what's
> >> usually called "a desktop". A screen can include multiple monitors.
> >> 
> >> https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/multihead#Separate_screens
> > 
> > You're right, I thought you meant two different monitors in Xinerama
> > style.  I didn't know anyone who still uses separate displays
> > (screens) these days.
> 
> I found it very helpful when I dealing with interruptions (which is
> about 50% of a typical day). I could flip one of the screens to a new
> virtual desktop (while leaving my email and web browser as-is on the
> other screen), deal with the interruption, then flip that screen back
> to the desktop containing whatever I was origininally working on.
> 
> My office setup had three screens, each with four virtual desktops.
> 
> When using multiple screens, you develop the habit of using one screen
> for common, always-on stuff (e.g. email, web browser) and the other
> screen(s) for working on code (or whatever).

I found Enlightenment to be most versatile in this respect.  Unlike say 
Plasma, which has two monitors locked on the same virtual desktop and when you 
switch to another virtual desktop *both* monitors flip over, in Enlightenment 
each monitor can switch to a different virtual desktop independently.  Like 
you, I keep always-on stuff on the left monitor, while switching between 
different virtual desktops on the right monitor.


> There are two main drawbacks to the multiple-screen setup:
> 
>  * You can't drag a window from one screen to the other. With the
>    monitor sizes that are common now, that's not as big an annoyance
>    as it used to be.

With Enlightenment you can move windows across monitors, irrespective of the 
virtual desktop each monitor displays.


>  * There are a few brain-dead (but vital) applications (e.g. Chrome)
>    that refuse to allow a user to run either multiple instances of the
>    application or allow windows on multiple screens (or X
>    servers). I'm a bit baffled by that restriction, but I'm sure it
>    allowed the developers to take some shortcut that saved 12 bytes of
>    data and 10 or 15 lines of code (out of many hundreds of megabytes
>    of occupied RAM and millions lines of code).
> 
> That said, you're right: using mulitple screens is no longer common.
> It's not even supported by many desktops these days. I switched from
> XFCE to openbox when XFCE dropped support for multiple screens.
> 
> --
> Grant