[gentoo-user] Re: Upgrading from 5.14 to 6.0 version

[Grant Edwards]

On 2022-11-21, Michael <confabulate@××××××××.com> wrote:
> On Monday, 21 November 2022 16:50:14 GMT Grant Edwards wrote:
>> On 2022-11-21, Michael <confabulate@××××××××.com> wrote:
>> > On Monday, 21 November 2022 16:11:13 GMT Grant Edwards wrote:
>> >
>> >> I did have to give up the option of having multiple X11
>> >> screens. The proprietary NVidia driver supported multiple screens,
>> >> but the drivers for built-in Intel and Radeon drivers don't seem
>> >> to.
>> >
>> > AMD APUs with embedded radeon graphics work fine here with two
>> > monitors (DVI + HDMI ports).
>>
>> Yes, multiple montors work fine with both Intel and Radeon embedded
>> graphics with Xorg drivers.
>>
>> It's multiple X11 screens that isn't supported.  An X11 screen is the
>> entity that's managed by single window manager and comprises what's
>> usually called "a desktop". A screen can include multiple monitors.
>>
>> https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/multihead#Separate_screens
>
> You're right, I thought you meant two different monitors in Xinerama
> style.  I didn't know anyone who still uses separate displays
> (screens) these days.

I found it very helpful when I dealing with interruptions (which is
about 50% of a typical day). I could flip one of the screens to a new
virtual desktop (while leaving my email and web browser as-is on the
other screen), deal with the interruption, then flip that screen back
to the desktop containing whatever I was origininally working on.

My office setup had three screens, each with four virtual desktops.

When using multiple screens, you develop the habit of using one screen
for common, always-on stuff (e.g. email, web browser) and the other
screen(s) for working on code (or whatever).

There are two main drawbacks to the multiple-screen setup:

 * You can't drag a window from one screen to the other. With the
   monitor sizes that are common now, that's not as big an annoyance
   as it used to be.

 * There are a few brain-dead (but vital) applications (e.g. Chrome)
   that refuse to allow a user to run either multiple instances of the
   application or allow windows on multiple screens (or X
   servers). I'm a bit baffled by that restriction, but I'm sure it
   allowed the developers to take some shortcut that saved 12 bytes of
   data and 10 or 15 lines of code (out of many hundreds of megabytes
   of occupied RAM and millions lines of code).

That said, you're right: using mulitple screens is no longer common.
It's not even supported by many desktops these days. I switched from
XFCE to openbox when XFCE dropped support for multiple screens.

--
Grant