Triple monitor oddities

[ShadYoung]

In the quest for ever more desktop real estate, I added a "wing" to my main display. By "wing" I mean a small, old Dell 1280x1024 LCD 17" monitor turned sideways (its designed to) in portrait mode on the left hand side (it is a perfect fit with the larger 27" LG IPS though its color is not great, but its not important for its usage). Obviously its horizontal resolution is now the vertical, and this is quite a bit narrower than what the system is used to and that has caused some issues.

1. I cannot get some things like Dolphin to open on anything but the new screen, even though it is not primary. I can close it from screen one or screen two, and it will always reopen on screen three. This never happened before, it would always reappear where it was closed. And its bugging the hell out me.

2. Some apps are resized horizontally. Firefox will open on the last screen it was on, but it is always resized from what it was to narrow and long as if it were on screen three. Dolphin will always resize to the max width of screen three then act oddly when moved (see next). This is also bugging the hell out of me.

3. If, for example, I try to make Dolphin fit close to the max width of the third screen, then move it over to another screen, it will suddenly go very wide and fill the whole width even though its not maximized. I realize this is an artifact of the edge snapping behaviour, but I like edge snap and do not want to give it up.

4. Notifications from certain apps pop up on the top left corner of screen three even if the app is on screen two or one.

It is odd because when I first attached the new monitor, and used it, window behavior was normal. It only seemed to suddenly get confused when I tried to add a panel to it. I have different panels on each screen and apps are tied to a specific screen where possible. Windows are sized and arranged to maximize my workflow efficiency.

I added the third "wing monitor" to act as a system monitor which now allows all telemetry to be displayed permanently when each working display is used with maximized or full screen apps. I should point out that the desktop crashed when I was setting up the monitoring widgets on the new screen and accidentally added the sticky-note and had to hard reboot. It was after this that things got weird (those stupid sticky note things have been a pain in the arse for a very long time... always popping when I do not want them to - they should just all go away).

I am using two Nvidia GPUs, the more powerful GPU driving the 46" gaming monitor, the low power one driving the new "telemetry monitor" and the IPS colour calibrated "editing" monitor. In the screen shot below, the order left to right, Dell 17, LG 27 IPS", Phillips 46".

I would very much now like to find another of this same model monitor (dell) and add a wing to the other side, then move the giant 46" movie/gaming monitor above them for a 4 display arrangement (which by my calculations should form a perfect square dimensionally). But, first I need to get three monitors working right.

[ShadYoung]

I have partially restored one normal behavior. Deleting dolphinrc in home/<user>/.config allows dolphin to reopen on the screen on which it was launched from. That at least solves the major annoyance as Dolphin and Firefox are the most used programs on my system by far. It does NOT fix the resizing problem. If I should then move Dolphin to the third screen, it will then re-bork itself and I have to delete the rc and reconfigure Dolphin again.

This behavior is present among all native KDE apps. Kate is now stuck on screen three. Konsole is stuck on screen three. Before moving the Konsole to screen 3, it refused to remember sizing and would always open with the smallest possible window (deleting its RC did allow it to remember position and size). Settings is now stuck on screen three. I imagine if I accidentally opened other KDE apps on screen 3, they would get stuck too.

With the exception of Firefox, every other non-KDE app is behaving normally, even if using QT. It is just the KDE built-in stuff. For example, I have all my widget arranged on screen 3 with 1/4 of screen 3 left free on the bottom right corner for Audacious (music) and Dragon (video) windows. They re-launch in the right place with the right size, and if I move one of them off of screen 3 to another screen, it will remember that, even if launched from screen 3. This is what I expect everything to do. What firefoxes particular problem is I have no idea. It was never launched from screen three.

Digging into Plasmashell.rc it appears there is significant garbage left over from previous versions of Kubuntu, with panel entries labeled Panel 136, 192, 2, 216, 24, 240, 270, 296, 298, 303, 328, and 79.

I am thinking that the oddities I am experiencing with 22.04 are due to the configurations from older installations conflicting with the new one. I was going to try to add a new user and see if the same issues cropped up in a completely clean home folder... but I just discovered I cannot seem to add a new user using either Settings or the KDE User and Groups app. I am considering deleting plasmashellrc but I am worried it will re-login with no panels. As I mentioned above, all this seemed to start when I tried to add a new panel to the new monitor.

The issue is definitely KDE specific and and not driver or system.