I'm running Xfce on a laptop, and (as a lecturer) I often connect to many different external displays (beamers) of various resolutions. When no external display or my 1920x1200 office monitor is connected, the internal laptop display runs at its native 1920x1200. When I connect the beamer before starting X, X automagically does the right thing: It starts the internal display at the same resolution as the external display, whatever that is, and runs in clone mode (that's what I need: Same screen on the laptop and on the beamer). That also worked with Gnome, because Gnome did not mess with video outputs or display resolutions. With Xfce, the internal display switches back to 1920x1200 (or whatever is set in the Xfce display settings) immediately after login. This is very annoying, because I have to check what the beamer's resolution is and switch the internal display to the beamer's resolution manually, *and* I have to switch it back manually to 1920x1200 when I'm back at my office, because on the next startup, Xfce of course sets it to the resolution I adjusted for the beamer. Could we please have an option "don't set anything on Xfce startup, just take what X has already set" for the display settings?
Hi, This bug looks like it has not received any attention, could anyone with the appropriate hardware please confirm it and mark it as Confirmed so the developers know they need to look it up? If someone among the devs/QA believes the current behaviour is correct, could they please comment on the report?
From the user's point of view, the behaviour is still the same: * Internal display is 1920x1080 (no longer 1920x1200). * VGA is connected to some beamer with 1024x768. * Laptop boots, X automatically starts with a login screen in size 1024x768, cloned to both the internal display and the beamer (which would be correct). * As soon as Xfce starts after login, it switches the screen to 1920x1080, and the beamer only shows the upper left corner of the screen (no scaling). Not what I want. However, I no longer use Xfce's display settings to switch back to 1024x768, but native xrandr commands bound to shortkeys, so I can live with the problem.
This issue may actually be fixed with xfce4-settings 4.11.3. If possible, can you give that a try? We gave the display settings a massive overhaul, improving many of its previous shortcomings. We now have proper support for display mirroring and the option to select display configuration on connection event.
I've been on 4.11.3 for quite some time. It is true that the dialog has been improved and that the dialog now comes up when I connect a new display or the beamer. However, the original problem is still present: If the beamer or a secondary display is already connected *before* X is started, X does the right thing by default in most cases: In case of my full HD internal display and an XGA (or 1280*...) external beamer, it correctly creates a 1024*768 (or 1280*...) screen and mirrors it to both internal display and beamer. But as soon as I log in, Xfce resets the screen to 1920*1080, (without showing the display config dialog), which is the config stored in Xfce settings for the internal HD display with no external displays or beamers connected. This causes the beamer to show only the upper left corner of the screen. Xfce should not change what X has set before. The Xfce display settings should have an option "don't change the display settings on startup, use what is already set".
I don't see disabling the display management as a valid option, tbh. The idea is that you can use it to configure your displays and I'm not sure you can make this much easier for the user. You're scenario seems to be a corner case to me and you can easily resolve it by either just opening the display dialog quickly or using keyboard-shortcuts (like you already do). So nothing to fix here.
I can live without a fix, but * you should not force the user to configure anything manually (no matter how easy and intuitive the config dialog is) if no manual configuration is needed at all and the defaults are correct ("If it ain't broken, don't fix it!"). Moreover, in my case, the display config dialog does not come up automatically, because there is no connect event. So to get things right I would have to start the display config manually whenever starting my notebook with a beamer. After all, the whole idea behind the X autoconfig project was to connect all your displays, start up X, and get the correct config in most cases without doing *anything*. You should not interfere with that. Your only duty is to provide an easy way to config displays when displays are added / changed / removed *after* initial startup. * I did not ask for disabling the display config completely. It is still nice to be able to start up the dialog and easily change the display config. I just asked for disabling the initial settings of the display config on session startup. * The problem does not seem to be a corner case. The beamer problem is the most annoying for me, but the Xfce initial display settings are much more pain than gain for me in general: - I regularly use my notebook on three different docking stations. - To each of them, a different monitor with different resolution is connected. - Of course, all three monitors show up on the same display output. - X autoconfig got all three of them right automatically. - No matter how I configure displays in Xfce, Xfce starts the displays up correctly for at most one dock, and I have to re-configure displays whenever starting Xfce while being connected to one of the other two docks. - Moreover, I was not yet able to config them correctly with Xfce's dialog: In all three cases, the external display has a higher resolution than the internal one, and I want the screen to be set to the resolution of the external display, and the internal display should show the upper left part of the screen. I manage to set that with the settings editor, but not with the config dialog.