GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 707375
Remember monitor position after disabling that monitor
Last modified: 2021-06-09 16:28:20 UTC
Created attachment 253958 [details] screenshot 1 - original placement I have two monitors, see screenshot 1. I use the built-in one on the left, the external one on the right. Sometimes I need to disable the built-in one. When I do that, its position is reset and it's placed to the rightmost topmost side. See screenshot 2. That's very inconvenient, because when I want to enable it again, I have to move it to the correct position, every time. Please remember position even for disabled monitors, so that I can simply toggle on/off and I don't need to adjust the position manually every time. Thanks. control-center-3.8.4.1-1.fc19.x86_64
Created attachment 253959 [details] screenshot 2 - placement after I disable built-in monitor and hit Apply
The Display panel was redesigned in GNOME 3.10, and currently there is no way to disable a display. The initial reasoning was that for laptops you can close the lid and for others you can unplug them. Bug 707570 is about re-introducing it.
Thanks. I hope bug 707570 will be resolved (the right way) and this report will still be relevant. The layout should stay remembered. But if the GUI is completely different (it seems it will be), maybe it's reasonable to close this. I can report it again, if I have the same problem with the new UI.
IMO this bug is caused by configuration paradigm of monitors.xml that includes just absolute coordinates but lacks hints of relative positions of the displays... If the respective monitor stanzas of monitors.xml cotained cross-links identifying neighbouring monitors (with lower priority than absolute coordinates), control-center could: 1) keep disabled outputs presented in their physical positions without unnecessarily stretching virtual screen size with blank/unreachable space 2) keep outputs relative positions in cases where user picks up yet-unused configuration of outputs
*** Bug 712329 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I don't think that we can remember the position of all the displays and do a good job at it, but certainly, turning off the leftmost monitor should be a bit more clever. When disabling the leftmost monitor, instead of positioning it to the end of the "row" of displays, with all the disabled monitors, we could "park" it left of the origin. Something like that: Before: |------------------- | | ------------ | | | | | | | | | | ------------------------------- ^ x: 0 After disabling the leftmost monitor: |------------------- | | ------------ | | | | | | | | | | ------------------------------- ^ x: 0
Attempt to revive this bug as the following user story plays directly with @Bastien's last comment. User story: - User wants to disable a secondary screen without disconnecting any hardware. This forces the viewport to display on a single display. Upon finishing the task, the user will then re-enable the screen in it's last listed position and orientation. Starting gnome-control-center display panel state: - Screen 2 at viewport offset 0px x 0px, as secondary display (w:h 1650x1050) - Screen 1 at viewport offset 1650px x 0px, as primary display (w:h 1920x1080) To reproduce: 1. Open the display panel 2. Select "Screen 2" which is listed as "Secondary", select "Turn Off", and "Apply". 3. Select "Keep Changes" 4. Select "Screen 2", select "Secondary Display", and "Apply" 5. Select "Keep Changes" Expected result: - EDIDs rescan as not been triggered, as displays have not be disconnected. - "Screen 2" turns off, and viewport snaps to 1 screen, pushing all application windows to "Screen 1". - As "Screen 2" had not been re-positioned by the user, it's offset should have remained in the same place (viewport offset 0px x 0px), causing "Screen 1" to bump back to a viewport offset of 1650px x 0px (being the width of the now re-enabled "Screen 2"). Actual result: - "Screen 2" turns off, and viewport snaps to 1 screen, pushing all application windows to "Screen 1" <-- 100% expected - "Screen 1"s viewport offset resets to 0px x 0px, and "Screen 2" is set to viewport offset 1920px x 0px (width of "Screen 1"). Most likely seems related to the following issues: #747529, #766469, and #734959. I do a large amount of work testing 10FT display interfaces with custom devices and have to regularly disable my 22" 1650x1050 display (secondary on left) to force usage on my 1080p screen (primary on right). If it's a busy day then I'm toggling the smaller screen off maybe 20x a day. Which means each time I'm toggling it back on as a secondary display, I'm having to push my screen cards around again in the display panel. This seems less intuitive than just toggling back on and the screen viewport offsets and having them returning to where they were previously. I could understand losing positioning on removal of a cable (change of EDID data), logging out of a session, or a gnome-shell reset. As these things would clear the session or expectantly reset the viewport, but no hardware nor session changes occur in this instance. On a side note I did notice that somewhere along the way position and orientation of turned off monitors was removed from the panel UI. As a user, hint of screen location sound very much like what would solve this problem. The idea of "preferred" positioning of screens. This would allow a user to prefer for example: their laptop screen to always be left-justified, external monitor 1 middle-justified, external monitor 2 right-justified; regardless of the screens being enabled or not.
Created attachment 354969 [details] Wireframe workflow for Gnome version v3.22.x (Expected/Actual) Wireframe workflow of current Display panel functionality.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new bug report at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.