Volunteer to help multi screen support development

[Roman Gilg]

On Sun, Oct 6, 2019 at 3:05 AM Germano Massullo
<germano.massullo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> KDE Plasma has always been my favourite desktop environment since KDE
> 3. Recently I had the feeling that there may be a lack of resources to
> fix some problems [*] of multi screen support. So, when my schedule
> allows it, I would like to volunteer to help. I had a short Qt
> development experience for work and I am also a Fedora package
> maintainer.
> I already went through
> https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/development so I would like to
> ask you what could I do in practice to help multi screen support
> development.
>
> Best regards

Hi Germano,

perfect timing! I wrote patches last few months to improve the multi
output behavior in KWin/KWayland and KScreen/libkscreen. Most of them
were code cleanup and restructuring code for later improvements.
Additionally there is now a new UI and logic for 5.17 coming up. It's
already on the beta channel. There is still more to do though.

For example on Wayland DPMS off changes have no impact on the overall
workspace size. But outputs being off should not be part of overall
Screen geometry. Also on Wayland output replication is missing at the
moment.

In regards to the KCM and its UI changing the ouput replication is
still somewhat clunky at the moment in the UI. The KCM is not yet
optimized for mobile use case (low priority). The output model should
be piped through a proxy model so we can show subsets of disabled or
replicated outputs in a clean way.

In regards to the bugs you posted: personally I only work on bugs
directly related to KWin or KScreen. Applicaiton/Qt bugs someone else
need to look into. For bugs not easily being classified as one or the
other you can ask me on IRC what kind of bug it is and I try to
classify it then. But what bugs you want to concentrate on is
independent of that of course.

In any case first step would be to get a development setup rolling and
build everything from master and for testing back ports the stable
branches. KDE Neon Unstable and kdesrc-build is what I use for that
because it's simple.

For more questions you can also ping me on IRC freenode network: romangg

Cheers
Roman

>
> [*] for example:
> Screens overlapping after screen unlock
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412368
>
> that triggers 404295
>
> "show only application on current screen" shows no applications
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404295
>
> Panel added to the wrong screen
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408060
>
> Plasma on Wayland detects only one screen
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412601
>
> Second screen rotated triggers Ark to appear on primary screen exceeding borders
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412535
>
> Second screen rotated triggers Gwenview to appear on primary screen
> exceeding borders
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=409454
>
> Second screen rotated triggers Gwenview to appear on primary screen
> exceeding borders
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412536
>
> Overlapping screens
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401774