Virtual screen

squili · 2022-06-30 21:55:48

I am considering buying an ultrawide monitor, but still want to treat it as two distinct screens. This would mean snapping and fullscreening would treat them as separate items. I would prefer a Wayland solution, but X works as well. This is sort of the opposite of xinerama.

seth · 2022-06-30 22:10:49

https://chipsenkbeil.com/notes/linux-vi … th-xrandr/

squili · 2022-06-30 22:23:57

This is exactly what I wanted! Thank you!

Looks like there's a lot of different ways to do it on different Wayland implementations - but it seems that there's virtual monitors in mutter: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/- … uests/1698. I should be able to figure it out once I eventually have to switch to Wayland for work. Unless anyone has a blog post they could find (I couldn't), I'll try to remember to update this post with what I did in case anyone stumbles upon this in search results.

Trilby · 2022-07-01 00:37:05

squili wrote:

Looks like there's a lot of different ways to do it on different Wayland implementations.

Only as many as there are wayland implementations!

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine: it is (mostly, see below) a nonsensical question to ask how to do something like this "on wayland". There is no wayland. It's a protocol, not a piece of software. Xorg is a single bit of software, so there can be blogs on how to configure this or that "on Xorg" while for many features / behaviors there couldn't be any information on how to configure them "on wayalnd". The information would be on how to do it for gnome/mutter, or for plasma, or for sway, or etc, etc...

There are two exceptions to this. If there are stable wayland protocols for the feature in question, then many compositors may support similar mechanisms of configuring something. But at present, there are a limited number of stable wayland protocols, and they cover only a very very tiny subset of features that Xorg users would take for granted. On top of that there are dozens if not hundreds of experimental protocols that may be supported by only one or a few compositors: some of these are multiple approaches to the same feature, so sway will work one way and plasma another.

There is an experimental protocol to replicate much of what xrandr did for Xorg called wlr-output-management. As the name indicates, this is from wlroots, so it is readily implemented in any wlroots compositors (sway being the main one). But it's not likely supported by mutter or plasma (though I'm not sure).

The second exception is for non-wayland infrastructure that is shared by most / all compositors. Wayland itself does nothing with input (keyboard, mouse) but relies on other libraries for this. On linux this is nearly universally provided by libinput and xkbcommon, and perhaps a couple others. So any settings that directly impact these libraries would work across effectively all linux-based wayland compositors (e.g., keyboard layout should be able to be set for *any* linux wayland compositor with the XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT environment variable). But output layout is handled directly by the wayland compositor, so there is no shared third party that can be configured for all / most compositors.

In short, there likely is a way to acheive what you want in most major / mature wayland compositors, but it's likely that the means to do so will be completely different for each compositor (except all those that use wlroots and thus the above-linked protocol).

Last edited by Trilby (2022-07-01 11:30:53)

squili · 2022-07-01 00:41:14

Ah, wonderful. Well, I'm specifically using GNOME/Mutter cause otherwise I feel like I wasted money on ram, so I guess I'll look for the Mutter-y way to do this.

progandy · 2022-07-01 03:59:05

squili wrote:

Ah, wonderful. Well, I'm specifically using GNOME/Mutter cause otherwise I feel like I wasted money on ram, so I guess I'll look for the Mutter-y way to do this.

The mutter virtual monitors seem to be only for "invisible" virtual monitors, not for splitting larger physical screens.

You are more likely waiting on this bug report with no activity for the last year: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1507

For xorg, xrandr has some options, but neither gnome nor kde support it. You may have more luck with a WM.

Last edited by progandy (2022-07-01 04:03:12)

Arch Linux

#1 2022-06-30 21:55:48

Virtual screen

#2 2022-06-30 22:10:49

Re: Virtual screen

#3 2022-06-30 22:23:57

Re: Virtual screen

#4 2022-07-01 00:37:05

Re: Virtual screen

#5 2022-07-01 00:41:14

Re: Virtual screen

#6 2022-07-01 03:59:05

Re: Virtual screen

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