[gentoo-user] Re: Xinerama vs TwinView for dual monitor setup

[Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com>]

On 2008-10-11, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:

> My research into nvidia's docs leads me to believe that TwinView is designed 
> to make the presence of two physical monitors invisible and present one giant 
> X screen, with a funky API for dead spaces (which may or may not work). I'm 
> thinking Xinerama is the better option, despite the fact that it's old, 
> clunky, hopeless at dealing with XRandR and can't be changed on the fly. I'm 
> happy to set up two ServerLayouts to deal with this.
>
> I'd appreciate some pros and cons feedback from the list before I embark on a 
> huge emerge -e world to include Xinerama support.

There's a third option you haven't mentioned: two different
displays rather than a large virtual display spread across two
monitors.  After reading up on the options, it's what I chose
to do.

Cons:

  * You can't drag a window from one display to the other.
  
  * Windows can't overlap from one display to the other.  

  * 3D HW accel and HW video overlay only available on one of
    the displays.  

Pros: 

  * Mouse movement and focus still act like one large display.

  * Each display can have it's own set of virtual desktops and
    they can be switched indpendantly.

  * Things like window-manager panels/docs/taskbars are managed
    separately for the two displays.

  * Displays can have different resolutions, sizes, depths.    

I particularly like having multiple virtual desktops for each
display and being able to independanly toggle the displays
among their virtual desktops.  Once in a while I wish I could
drag a window from one display to the other, but not very
often.
    
-- 
Grant