Maximized windows do not take taskbar into account

[whochismo]

For some reason, in my laptop, when I maximize a window, it maximizes using the whole screen, without taking into account the space occupied by the bottom taskbar/panel, so the 42 bottom pixels of each windows are hidden by the taskbar.

Here's an example. Non-maximized window (Dolphin, notice the statusbar at the bottom showing the number of elements and the zoom level)


Maximized windows (note how that bottom bar with the number of elements and the zoom level is no longer visible, because it's hidden by the panel)


The only workaround for this is, every time I power on my laptop, to go to monitor settings, change the resolution, and change it back to 1080p, so programs detect that the maximized window should not overlap with the taskbar.

On occasion I use my laptop connected to a secondary (1440p) screen via HDMI, so I suspect that the dual screen configuration might be interfering when the second monitor is not present.

Does anyone know a solution for this issue? Thanks in advance.


Edit: it's funny how the screenshots are exactly 1440 pixels in height, when the screen is only 1080 pixels high...

[jlittle]

Have you checked the relevant panel setting? Right-click somewhere unused on the panel, click "Enter Edit Mode", then click "More Options". Under "Visibility" there's four radio buttons, and I think you've just described "Windows Go Below".

[rab0171610]

And if "Windows Go Below" is not checked, try enabling it and then then disabling it again to see it if has any effect. Sometimes the Plasma settings get wonky and can be fixed that way, by implicitly enabling and then disabling to "turn on" and then "turn off" the unwanted behavior, even if it was never initially set.

[whochismo]

Hi again,

I checked that option (enabling and disabling it too), but that did not make a difference.

However, I tried the "auto-hide" option, and I saw something strange. In order for the panel to popup, you have to hover it with the mouse. But the cursor actually went far below the panel. The only way to show up the panel was to stop it exactly at the pixel at the bottom of the screen. It is as if there was a chunk of screen below. This is consistent with the screenshots I pasted before, showing around 400 px under the actual screen.

It's hard to explain in text, but for plasma, my resolution is actually 2560×1440 instead of 1920x1080, and the extra pixels are hidden on the right side and bottom of the screen. Of course, the monitor configuration windows shows that I'm using 1920x1080, the native resolution.

This is very weird.

[whochismo]

By the way, I forgot to mention one thing. The second monitor is 1440p, but Kubuntu does not detect its native resolution by default, so I have to run this startup script as root so the 1440p resolution is available:

#! /bin/bash
xrandr --newmode "2560x1440R"  241.50  2560 2608 2640 2720  1440 1443 1448 1481 +hsync -vsync
xrandr --addmode HDMI-2 "2560x1440R"
xrandr --addmode HDMI-1 "2560x1440R"
xrandr --output HDMI-2 --mode "2560x1440R"
xrandr --output HDMI-1 --mode "2560x1440R"

Maybe it is interfering, although it should only affect HDMI monitors, not the build-in laptop screen.

[rab0171610]

I have had this in the past when I used to use a television back in the 90s attached to my computer as a second monitor to display videos in fullscreen. Monitors were not large back then and tv out was a relatively new technology if you had a video card that could support it. Most of those types of connections do not exist nowadays. Ideally it worked best when both monitors were same resolution (virtual ouput size.) At that time the two monitors were panned into a shared resolution. So if both monitors were 800x600 for example, then they both shared a resolution of 1600x600, each taking up half. The problems would come in when one monitor had a larger resolution than the other, and in that case it was "panned" within the resolution of the other. If one was 1200x900, the full resolution would be for example, 2400x900 (2 times the resolution) with the second monitor of 800x600 residing in half. This left you with space around the video output. There were various ways of dealing with this but it left you with a situation like you are describing. Because of that, I gave up on multiple monitors years ago. That being said, I don't know how this works these days as things change over the years. Someone with modern experience can probably help you figure out what works with your setup. If things with X11 have not changed with regards to multiple monitors, then the behavior is expected.
This post is from 2011 which explains somewhat my legacy experience:
https://thelinuxexperiment.com/two-m...s-one-desktop/

The two monitors above are actually sharing one big logical screen resolution of 2640×1024 and each monitor is placed within that big resolution:

If you’ve ever tried to set up two monitors on Linux you’ll know that its a relatively painless process. The only issue that I’ve found comes when the two monitors in question do not share a common resolution between them. In testing a setup of mine I found that when I extended my desktop across the two monitors I was actually left with a ‘dead’ space above one.

As you can see in the above picture there is a space above my left monitor. The way that X does monitor spanning is to create a large ‘logical’ monitor by stacking your real monitor’s resolutions side by side. In effect this created a logical monitor of size 2640×1024 (the total width of the two monitors’ resolutions by the largest of the two’s resolution).

Hopefully someone will be able to help you figure out a solution. Good Luck!

[vanadiumboy]

I have also had a problem with multiple monitors.
I use the official nVidia driver for my GTX 980.
This happened with Kubuntu 18.04.
Every time I booted up, the left monitor’s top area, 120 pixels or so were black. If I passed a window over that area, it would leave a trail.
The entire screen looked down shifted by 120 pixels.
Do fix this, I had to go into System Settings, move the screen, press Apply.

With Kubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 (or maybe due to the nVidia driver updates), this problem went away.

Unfortunately, I can’t offer any real help