plasma5 screen management going wrong

[Bug Reporter]

see below

On Mon, Jul 2, 2018 at 2:25 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan at cox.net> wrote:
> Bug Reporter posted on Sun, 01 Jul 2018 21:17:29 -0400 as excerpted:

> This is likely the kscreen component, or libkscreen ...
>  I finally unmerged/uninstalled those two components

To clarify, you removed kscreen and libkscreen? I'm running Arch
Linux, so I can probably uninstall those packages as well.

>  And if I /do/ want to change the layout or resolution on-the-fly, I can use xrandr to do it, or simply
> change the xorg.conf configuration and restart x/kde/plasma to have it take effect.

It would be really helpful to find some examples of exactly how to
apply your approach to a laptop which docks and undocks to/from a dock
with multiple external displays. I would like to try your approach,
but I don't have any experience with xrandr at all, and it has been an
incredibly long time since I messed with xorg.conf. Any instructions
or links are appreciated.

> The trouble in this case seems to be that kscreen assumes a laptop with a monitor attached...

Thanks for the clue. Knowing that this is related dto kscreen, I
reported a bug here:

396071 – plasma5 screen management going wrong
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=396071

> There's no real way to tell it "hey, this is an xorg-preconfigured
> desktop system, use it as-is and don't bother it".

It worked fairly well for the last two years. I agree with you that it
has never been perfect or totally robust, but it was good enough not
to interfere with our work in a major way until it became broken in
the last couple weeks. Now it is a serious problem.

I need some help with further testing. In particular, could someone
tell me which configuration files are involved in the System Settings
> "Display and Monitor" settings? In particular, where does KDE store
the screen geometry and relative placement (and primary display)? And
which config files are involved in the desktop background and panel
placement for each screen? These are the main settings that are
getting lost.

> set plain text for mailing lists

Done. But in Gmail, I will have to remember to toggle it every single
time I send a mail to this list. As you suggested, a better solution
is needed. Gmail also defaults to toip-posting, which seems to be a
bad decision by Google...