[ale] Multi-Monitor Behavior

[David Jackson]

Progress report:

https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/5487

It looks like this behavior (moving windows to a single monitor after
screen lock and monitors awakening from sleep mode) is an older problem
with gnome.  Like four years old!  It only appears with multi-monitor
setups, apparently.  The only partial solution I've found is to not
hibernate the monitors.  Apparently the problem derives from one monitor
being slower to wake up than the other.  And apparently if I were to use a
non-gnome window manager, the problem would go away.

BTW, I'm using Cinnamon on Arch.  I have a laptop running Mint 20.0 with an
external display that doesn't seem to have this problem.  I'm typing this
from my latest box running Arch and the latest Cinnamon version, which does
have this problem.  All of my other Cinnamon desktops use a single monitor,
so no joy there.

Does anyone here have any experience with this problem?

On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 5:56 PM David Jackson <deepbsd.ale at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> I just built a Black Friday box and installed Arch (less than 10 min with
> my spanking Farchi script!), but now I have a curious behavior that I think
> has to do with a power savings setting I'm not aware of.
>
> I'm using Cinnamon with LightDM.  When I come back to my two displays
> (primary HDMI and secondary DP), all apps that are open wind up on the
> primary display only.  Everything that had been on the slave display gets
> moved to the primary.  I've been using Cinnamon/LightDM for a long time,
> and I've never seen this behavior before.
>
> My theory is that the secondary display is trying to power off, but the
> primary doesn't power off, and the WM moves all apps to the only monitor it
> sees still "awake."
>
> The behavior I want and had with the previous box (previous to the Black
> Friday build) is Both monitors hibernate and the apps stay where they
> were.  As it appears now, I cannot catch either monitor hibernating.  The
> machine itself is NOT suspending or hibernating.  I don't have the ACPI
> settings set to hibernate the computer.  I just want the monitors to
> hibernate.  That's what I'm going for.  (The new mobo is a Gigabyte Z390M
> BTW.)
>
> Any ideas about what's going on?  All help welcomed in thinking through
> this.  TIA!
>
> Dave
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20201219/2ced2496/attachment.html>