How to setup dual monitor in kde?

[Duncan]

Marcelo Magno T. Sales posted on Sat, 26 May 2012 20:31:11 -0300 as
excerpted:

> I'm running 4.8.2, Ubuntu packages. However, since yesterday, the
> configuration saved as default in System Settings began to stick. Now I
> can logout and login again and the monitors configuration stays as I had
> left it. I didn't do anything different, there were no updates... Don't
> know why it works now (not complaining, not complaining at all! :) )
> However, right after this began to work, this other problem showed up:
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=300642

There's a number of bugs that sounds very much like.  Here's the one it 
sounds most like, except yours isn't NEARLY as bad, with the link to a 
comment of mine summarizing the fixes that worked for various people.  
But this one is marked resolved/fixed, so your problem may be related but 
it shouldn't be exactly the same.  However, some of the fixes/workarounds 
in my list may well help.

Panels and windows hidden behind desktop background at start
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260360#c75

(The whole bug history is a rather long, but it reads a bit like a 
detective novel.  Some people, both users and devs, get a bit frustrated, 
too, spicing it up a bit!  If you have time to read it all, it really is 
fascinating, and gives an interesting glimpse into just how hard some of 
these bugs are to nail down!)


There's another family of bugs that's a bit different, but possibly 
related, that there's now a somewhat easy fix for.  One of the dups is 
mine (mine was filed earlier but there were more people on the other bug 
already, so when it became apparent they were dups, I suggested mine dup 
the later one).

Auto-hiding panel sometimes moves to middle of the screen when being 
viewed  https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=272663

The easy fix is, without kde running, move ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-
desktoprc somewhere else (I'd say delete, but moving it is safer, since 
you can put it back if necessary, ~/.kde is the default from kde, but 
it's ~/.kde4 on some distros).  That file contains mostly "trivial" 
settings like which side a panel is on and whether it's always-shown, 
auto-hide, etc, plus window sizes for a number of dialogs, etc.  Nothing 
so major it's going to be a huge loss.  You'll have to reset the panel 
location and size and perhaps a few other things, but if it's part of the 
same bug family, deleting the file will fix the problem, and it won't be 
back, at least immediately.

At least with that family of bugs, removing that file is all that's 
necessary.  On my request, someone posted a copy of the "bad" file, along 
with a diff between it and what kde recreated that worked correctly, but 
there wasn't any obviously smoking gun in it, so I still don't know the 
problem, but hopefully it'll help the devs track it down.  Also, my bug 
report had a bisect to the original commit that first triggered the 
problem for me, back in 4.6.2 IIRC, tho that commit was a fix for 
something else and apparently simply triggered a latent bug.  But between 
the two, hopefully a dev now has enough information to be able to fix 
that when they get a chance to really look into it, now.

Anyway, if your bug is fixed by killing plasma-desktoprc, it's very 
likely a dup of some sort, even if the symptoms are a bit different.  I'd 
suggest putting a link from one bug to the other at least, and letting a 
kde bug wrangler decide whether to dup it or not, but only if killing 
plasma-desktoprc fixes the problem.

(There's another, similarly named file, plasma-desktop-appletsrc, that is 
a **VERY** important file for people who've customized quite a bit, as it 
contains the main configuration for all the panels, activities, etc, 
along with all the plasmoids they contain.  I'd suggest backing up that 
file, once you get your desktop the way you want it, as it does seem a 
bit of a magnet for bugs of its own, it's very nearly too complex to 
properly edit by hand (tho I've done it, but I don't ever want to have to 
do so again!) and if you end up deleting it, you start from scratch to 
reconfigure all panels and activities along with the plasmoids in them, 
which is pretty major if you're as much of a customizer as I am, and it 
seems you're at least getting there!)

> It seems I can never have KDE working 100%. Every time I fix a problem,
> another one shows up. Even so, KDE is still better than the available
> alternatives. At least KDE ends up doing what I want after some hard
> work.

Yes, indeed.

Back in the still extremely broken kde4 days of 4.2 or so, when kde devs 
were insisting kde4 was ready for normal use at the very same time they 
continued to say various bits of kde3 functionality weren't yet even 
ported to kde4, I complained about that, saying no way was it ready for 
regular use.  IMO it only got there with late 4.5, which really should 
have been 4.0, with 4.2 actually still very alpha (4.3 beta, 4.4 rc...).

But thru all of it, I stayed with kde, both because I believed it would 
eventually get there (as it did), and because for heavy customizers like 
you and I, kde, even with all its warts, really is the best thing out 
there, by so far that it's as if there's no other choice (there are, but 
they're far worse).

So I definitely understand where you're coming from.

> But Gnome and Unity don't, no matter how hard I try :)

Watching all the hubbub over gnome3, the devs insisting there was only 
one way, their way, and anybody who didn't appreciate it simply didn't 
know what was good for themselves, certainly had me recalling why I'm a 
kde user here, that's for sure!  At least on kde, they understand that 
not everybody's the same, and that what's right for me may well not be 
right at all for the next guy, and expose the configuration tools 
necessary for both I and the next guy to have it like we want/need. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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