GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 789572
Alignment of external screen limits placing of icons
Last modified: 2017-10-27 19:11:59 UTC
Created attachment 362431 [details] Alignment of screens limits where icons can be placed. GNOME in Ubuntu, reporting against gnome-shell since I do not know better. Please assign to appropriate package. Thanks! Using external monitors with the gnome desktop behaves unexpected in a few ways. One is, that the alignment of screens limits, where icons can be placed on that screens: My external monitor is higher than the internal screen of my laptop. I have aligned the screens at the bottom. This makes the bottom part of the (external, higher) screen unusable for placing icons. This is probably best seen on the attached screenshot. Thanks for caring!
That's a limitation of the EWMH spec - nautilus places desktop icons according to the _NET_WM_WORKAREA[0] hint, which is calculated relative to screen edges (in constrast to having separate workareas per monitor). Given that EWMH is tied to X11 and we are transitioning to wayland, it's unlikely that anyone will go through the effort of coming up with a spec change proposal (and implementation once it's agreed upon), so closing as wontfix. But note that Carlos had some ideas about porting nautilus' desktop icons to a gnome-shell extension, which would neither be tied to X11 nor to the limitations of EWMH. [0] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html#idm140200472697552