[gentoo-amd64] How well does your dual-head window manager handle games?

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   On the new machine I've set it up as dual-head which is working
nicely for all the basic stuff, and in general pretty nicely for
running VMWare/WinXP on the second screen for most of the day. I have
a few issues, like the mouse can become __very__ laggy in VMWare at
times but other than that all the basics are there and working well
enough to get some work done. I'm using XFCE4 at the moment.

   The one place where I've been a bit disappointed is when the VGA
drivers need to switch resolutions to play a game like Tux Racer then
instead of two desktops I'm seeing one desktop duplicated on both
monitors. Is this normal or is there some general way to control this?
I'd really like the game on one monitor and just have the other stay
black.

   More disturbing is when I exit the game I'm left with both desktops
displaying the same things and neither is exactly my original first or
second desktop but rather a combination of the two which is fairly
strange. (Desktop #1 icons with Desktop #2 wallpaper)

   I'm wondering if other environments handle this better. XFCE is
pretty lightweight, which I like. I'd gone away from Gnome because of
the time spent maintaining it on Gentoo but on this machine it
probably wouldn't be all the bad. Not sure I want KDE but I'm curious
as to whether anything solves this problem?

   Logging out of XCFE and then running startx gets everything back
the way I want, and I don't think I'll play Linux games much, but I'm
curious as to how well other environments handle this.

Cheers,
Mark