GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 592673
Multihead unlock dialog
Last modified: 2015-03-05 09:54:11 UTC
(This is a split out of 455118 which covered a few issues - there is a patch in there from Rodrigo Mayo that may be appropriate, together with some of the comments on there) With a dual head setup in some environments it would be very useful to have the dialog on unlock appear on both heads (with both of them being identical). Currently if for some reason you can't see one of the heads and you hit a key while the mouse is on the hidden screen then you just see the screensaver stop and the visible screen go completely black; it's not obvious what to do to get out of it (answer: Move the mouse a lot and hit escape a few times). Scenarios I've seen this: 1) Dual head where one of the monitors has dual inputs to another machine 2) Laptops which only have the 2nd head in sometimes (and which don't always deconfigure it) or where that 2nd head is on something inconvenient like a projector. Dave
So, I don't think you want this in most cases. In the projector mode I don't want to type my password on the screen but only on my internal panel. In the side by side monitors case it looks weird to have two unlock dialogs (which one do I use?). What do you mean by "hidden" monitor? I guess I'd say that if the laptop lid or something is closed or a monitor is turned off we should disconnect it and show on the one that is visible (as much as we can tell that).
I'm using GNOME in a multi-monitor scenario. On my system the location of the dialog seems to be quite random, I'd much prefer the unlock dialog to be present on all screens. Also, my monitor is much slower to start displaying again than my laptop screen and if the unlock dialog goes only to it I have to wait a few seconds before I can type my password and get back to my desktop. For projectors you could probably detect them and not display the unlock dialog there. What do KDE, Windows and MacOS do with unlock dialogs in multi-screen scenarios?
The screen lock is implemented directly in gnome-shell, not in gnome-screensaver (as it was with older version of GNOME 3 and GNOME 2.x). Reassigning.
Marking as duplicate of bug 685300 which specifies the expected behavior of the lock screen on multihead. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 685300 ***