Here are the results of my quick survey of Window Managers present in Debian/Stable. That is the same Debian that has the Xorg server with classic dualhead effectively removed.
The goal is to see how practical xrandr is for dual-screen purposes, today. I started the X11 server with 1400x1050 on the internal LCD of my Thinkpad and then added a monitor on the VGA port via randr. fvwm2: completely broken, cannot even get keyboard focus to the second screen, although you can move clients there with the mouse. Enlightenment only has E16 in Debian/stable. I will compile E17 later to see whether it has virtual desktop support with xrandr but I did give E16 a spin. Entirely broken. The second desktop cannot pan, so you never get to see the WM bars at the bottom. There is graphical corruption when moving windows (leaves the "trace") and graphical corruption from some other action I didn't identify (black goo under top bar). I took photos in case you want to see. GNOME and KDE are behaving the same: kinda works but as expected it has no support for individual virtual desktop switching (yet?). But there are problems with GNOME/KDE even if you accept the lack of virtual desktops. Just opening GIMP in the xrandr'ed X11 server under GNOME makes GIMP come up half on the left screen and half on the right screen (photo available). It even has single dialog boxes that are obviously hardcoded to open in the middle of what GIMP thinks is "the display", and that means it has a dialog box coming up between the screens with the "yepp" buttom on the main screen on the "nah" on the second screen. I assume this is the same as if you had used Xinerama, and it is one other major reason why I used individual displays for dual-head, and never used Xinerama. Even outside of GIMP problems there's more trouble when running KDE and GNOME, namely that the second screen doesn't pan so you can never reach (or read) the bottom taskbar. That works just fine in classic dualhead. I also noticed that even GNOME's internal dialogs are confused. For example, the battery status pop-up indicator for battery status comes up half on the left and half on the right display. Compiz: broken, hangs. No idea whether that's due to the xrandr or something else. Anyway... It looks to me like removing classic dualhead has been done way ahead of time. The above is certainly not usable for dual-screen setups the way I and people I know get their work done, and annoying for many other people, witness the GIMP misbehavior. I originally thought that KDE/GNOME might work well enough if you accept the lack of individual virtual desktop switching, but it is just not the case. Just GIMP is basically confused to the point of unusability and if I used GNOME or KDE - how am I supposed to live without the bottom taskbar? And that's after me only trying GIMP, who knows which other multi-window programs are broken. In any case, myself I am not willing to live without individual virtual desktop switching in the first place. There's a reason why I picked a Unix over Windows, and that is that vendor's can't easily decide that "my" features without me being able to fight back. Overall my original impression has been reinforced: you basically dropped what hackers need when getting work done on a desktop Unix machine in favor of what managerish types coming from Windows need when standing in front of a projector and need to get their single-task thing done. Before I pass final verdict, what would be involved in -say- hacking up fvwm2 to deal with xrandr? Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <craca...@cons.org> http://www.cons.org/cracauer/ FreeBSD - where you want to go, today. http://www.freebsd.org/ _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list xorg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
