KDE Gains “Magic Monitor” Functionality With New KScreen

This is mostly blogspam for this: <a href="http://www.afiestas.org/screen-management-got-magic/" rel="nofollow">http://www.afiestas.org/screen-management-got-magic/</a><p>It's easy to be cynical about this, but I for one am very pleased about this development. So sorely needed. Perhaps in a small way it can help slow down the migration from Linux to Mac on the desktop.

I'm not sure why people are always complaining about multi-monitor handling on Linux. It's always worked just fine for me. With an open source graphics driver, there's RandR and various frontends for it. With any proprietary driver, you use their own UI for it.

I think that "Magic Monitor" oversells this. I expected something much more... magic...

If this works I'll be delighted. I've got an Ubuntu installation with three monitors and two graphics cards and I burnt untold hours of my life getting them all to work. Then an upgrade came along and broke them for good.<p>Of all the things that could be improved[1] on linux this would be my number one preference. Screen real estate is critical for development work and I have practically been driven back to Windows or Mac.<p>[1] A flash player that doesn't tint everything blue would also be welcome.

This is great news.<p>I've been using a patch that I made to address this annoying issue in KDE for a year now:<p><a href="https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/103356/" rel="nofollow">https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/103356/</a><p>My patch was more of a hack than anything else but it did its job. I'm happy though that I won't need to patch every new KDE version any longer :)

This is definitely a step forward but my biggest annoyance with Linux and external monitors is handling CRTs that (apparently) send incomplete EDID information. With literally every CRT monitor I've used with Linux, the highest resolution option I've seen in the default popup is 1024x768, with the maximum refresh rate being the headache-inducing 60 Hz, regardless of the monitor's actual capability.<p>At least more recently I've been able to get xrandr to work so that I can add other resolutions myself, and then I can put them in a script to run on boot, but holy <i>crap</i> is that annoying. Windows and Mac OS X have no problem detecting what these displays support, but X has been dropping the ball on this for years.

aerosnap is a feature I sorely miss on Linux. I have been able to recreate its functionality for a single screen, but I have been unable to make it work correctly for a dual screen setup.<p>It seems that have multiple screens in Linux creates a drawing canvas that is rectangular in shape and it is not clear how to find out the more complicated 2 rectangle shape.<p>I would like to see this issue addressed.

what a magic in 2012. i'm impressed. &#60;/sarcasm&#62;

This looks great! I've come to really rely on the "closed clamshell mode" that was shown off last in the video -- Macs have had this for quite a while now. But it's always really great to see some work being done in this field. Kudos to the developers and the sponsors!

Exactly why I stopped using Linux ten years ago.