GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 747529
Position of displays is not remembered when monitors are reused
Last modified: 2021-07-05 13:52:56 UTC
I have a laptop and a monitor as secondary display. There’s 2 use-cases I have for it: 1. Use the monitor as only display. When watching movies, or sometimes when working. 2. Use the monitor as primary display and the laptop monitor as secondary display. Now this works nearly perfectly using the display manager except for one thing. Every time I switch back from only using the monitor (laptop display disabled) to using the laptop display as a second screen – I need to rearrange the displays. By default they are side-by-side but I always want the monitor above the laptop display. Especially since the resolution and everything else (like using the monitor as primary display when it’s plugged in) is already remembered, it would be cool if the layout can also be remembered.
Usually we handle one configuration per displays combination. So if you plug your laptop in your TV, it will have the same configuration the next time you plug it in the TV. But in your case, we wouldn't know whether you're modifying the current configuration, or creating a new one. The only thing I would guess is that mutter (which loads and saves the configuration) doesn't remember the position of the display you turn off, dropping it from the configuration. It should probably include it in the ~/.config/monitors.xml file, with its previous position, even if disabled. That way, re-enabling it would pop it back in the same location.
Yep, it seems to drop the position. Because when I switch from: Monitor primary, laptop secondary to Monitor secondary, laptop primary the configuration is properly remembered. That is, the external monitor is always correctly above the laptop. It’s just when switching to »Mirror« or »Off« and then back to one of Primary/Secondary that the positioning is reset. So basically yes, it would be good if the last used positioning could not only be remembered when switching between the two/multiple-screen setups, but also when there’s only a one-screen setup so that it’s properly restored when switching back to the multiple-screen one. Thanks!
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 ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.