In a regression in recent years, Linux has failed to keep a feature well supported by its own earlier versions and all the various Windows OSen: to simulate one large display as well with two or three possibly dissimilar graphics cards as it does with one card with two or three or more outputs. The cost of graphics cards with many outputs comes at a great price and performance hit over more cards with fewer outputs. This is becoming particularly pressing now that processors support on-die graphics adapters in addition to PCI express graphics slots supporting video adapters which almost never have the same architecture as the on-die graphics.
The arrival of pre-supposed support for compositing has ended the use of Xinerama, which at one time was the approach to this problem.
Many will be quick to note xrandr is 'the new way'. For graphics cards hosting on the same card enough outputs for the entire system, it works (though I've yet to find a linux system on which dragging monitor icons when there are 3+ around the display configurator works). The command line interface for xrandr is, well, its own entire body of obscure knowledge. No real comparison to the simple Windows display dragging and sizing GUI.
As a work around, because try though I did for days of searching and attempting solutions to make it work all-Ubuntu: I'm forced to use a Windows front end which does a flawless job with two low/mid-market graphics cards acting as an X server to a headless Ubuntu back-end. It's ugly. But without it no work happens. All because Ubuntu can't manage more than one graphics card forming a large simulated single display as once it did. Indeed there are vendor specific expensive workarounds: Nvidia's SLI + base Mosaic, Radeon / Quadro multi-headed 'whole paycheck' graphics cards, etc. but Ubuntu shouldn't rely on such things when others do so well with what was installed-- over against Ubuntu upgrades that render a previously working system broken.
I urge whoever it is that sets goals in these matters to consider this. Thanks for reading!
Harry G Coin Bettendorf, Iowa -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
