Re: [gentoo-user] Why is KDE so bad at multiple monitors?

["Arsen Arsenović" <arsen@gentoo.org>]

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Hi,

Daniel Frey <djqfrey@gmail.com> writes:

> I've been gone for a few days as I was rebuilding my main PC.
>
> I thought I'd provide an update: it was xorg-server causing all the issues.
>
> I figured as I had to redo everything anyway to switch to systemd and wayland
> as that's what the bigger DE's tend to be supporting nowadays.
>
> After fiddling around with systemd for a day (I'd tried it once before
> converting a system from openrc->systemd and failed miserably - nothing worked)
> I've reconfigured most things the "systemd" way.
>
> I guess starting fresh solves all sorts of issues. :o)
>
> Some things I like about systemd:
>   - It is capable of automounting NFS shares out of the box; I just
>     configured fstab so systemd automatically generated the automount
>     configured it required. No extra steps needed;
>   - It provides a scrollable list by default showing all the items you
>     have access to in order to change how your machines behaves;
>   - It isolates services in logs. This was helpful when sddm didn't want
>     to behave.
>
> Some things I don't like:
>   - It has nutty network configuration. It was applying an APIPA network
>     address as the primary for my interface which broke all sorts of
>     tools. Took me a while to figure out how to stop that.

IMO networkd is not worth using - I've just disabled it and use
NetworkManager instead.  KDE expects it also, fwiw, so it integrates
nicely.

>   - It doesn't update resolv.conf even though I'd specified a DNS
>     server! So literally nothing worked. For now I manually removed
>     resolv.conf and put the DNS server there. Plan to use something
>     else for network management that sets resolv.conf properly. I have
>     no desire to use networkd-resolved.

I recommend replacing /etc/resolve.conf with a stub:

  ~$ ls -l /etc/resolv.conf 
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 37 Nov  7  2022 /etc/resolv.conf -> /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf

If you do that, you get DNS caching, DoT, ...

And, if you do that, DNS is configured via /etc/systemd/resolved.conf
(and possibly the network manager to configure per-interface settings
based on DHCP, for instance).

See https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Systemd/systemd-resolved for the
instructions on how to enable it (the article is still a stub, though,
sadly :/)


> But, back to the original problem...
>
> I don't know what was broken in my original system. I always had to reconfigure
> monitors every time I logged in.
>
> As I mentioned I switched to wayland and on the fresh install it actually gave
> me a desktop. I set the monitor orientation and location, and I can log out and
> back in and it remembers the monitor orientation and location now. Which is
> what I was trying to solve.
>
> However, sddm was still quite broken and the monitors were in some default
> strange configuration that made no sense. I fought with this with xrandr trying
> to solve it and nothing I did would make it stick. I then found in KDE's sccm
> settings you can apply the wayland desktop settings to sccm - I did that but
> was disappointed when I rebooted that it didn't work. What did work was reading
> the docs and switching sddm to use wayland and kwin instead of X11! Once I did
> that, now the monitor layouts are the same between the desktop and sddm. So I'm
> happy about that.
>
> Other issues I came across were forgetting the kernel config for nvidia cards
> and tty output. It took me a lot of head scratching and searching to realize I
> had enabled something in the kernel that was doing this.
>
> The sound server also dramatically changed as I had no sound at all from KDE
> but I could see, use and get sound from the shell. Some new pipewire thing. I
> really wish that devs would fix existing things that have issues instead of
> making a new thing that doesn't work.

Pipewire actually works significantly better than PulseAudio, and was
originally intended to generalize it to also handle video.  Pipewire is
Pulse-compatible, and we support it well.  I hope the article at
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/PipeWire covers whatever issues you might
run into.

> Other than that, I really had no issues. Was able to mount encrypted volumes
> with no fuss.
>
> I'm now working on the important bits - customizing KDE again and restoring my
> backups.
>
> I did have an odd issue (well, still have actually - it's not resolved) with
> microcode but I'll create a new thread for that.
>
> So, wayland and systemd actually fixed something for me. Who would've
> thought...

They're quite nice, IMO :D

Have a lovely day :-)
-- 
Arsen Arsenović

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