I have a long standing pet peeve with wallpaper settings. I use KDE on a laptop, with and without external screens (and several of those at different times - at work, at home, at the library, different places at the university, giving resentations…). Now, if you want to change your wallpaper with a usecase like mine, the procedure is really unnecessarily messy:
- go find an external monitor
- connect it
- remember that you can only set a wallpaper for all monitors in the settings, not by rightclicking the desktop (although the settings are otherwise identical)
If this is not followed exactly, newly connected monitors, eg. during a presentatin, will always have either the default Breeze wallpaper or whatever the last one you used was. This is annoying.
I have some ideas to improve this:
- duplicate the whole settings page including the monitor selection between the right click desktop menu and the settings wallpaper menu
- the toggle could be always visible and have better text (it is not just “apply to all monitors”, it is also “make this the default for new monitors”)
I am willing to try my hand at implementing this, but I first wanted to ask if this is even wanted. I saw in old discussions that making the wallpapers the same on all monitors is a somewhat contentious issue.
Another, maybe better idea is to just not have the wallpaper settings duplicated like that. The right lick menu could be a link to the Settings page. Otherwise you always get drift between the two places
the problem as i see it, is that applying background images is narrowly focused on the monitors themselves, rather than the virtual desktop like you see in the pager view.
a more layered approach would have a backdrop that worked more like a stage presentation, where the individual monitors are merely temporary actors who appear on the stage.
imagine a backdrop bigger than any collection of monitors you could conjure up, and as you place monitors on the stage, the background for that monitor would simply show that small window to the backdrop.
and if you move that monitor or add another, they would simply show the backdrop portion that lay behind their new position on the stage… the backdrop itself would be unaffected.
this is almost completely the opposite of how things currently work, and it would probably irritate some ppl who want close control over the background image on each monitor, so i would only suggest this as an option rather than an alternative.
I mean that could work, but only for people who have all monitors arranged exactly how they are in real life and with identical DPI. This is often not the case, I’d even say the majority of the time.
to be clear, how ever the monitors are arranged in the display configuration, is what i’m referring to.
it is certainly possible to arrange your display config to be different from you physical display arrangement… in which case, i’m not sure it would matter, you would just arrange the configuration to show the monitor out in space over the portion of the backdrop you want to appear as the background on that monitor.
but in any case the part of the backdrop displayed on the monitor would be a superposition of the display configuration upon the backdrop, with perhaps the ability to shift or resize the backdrop as needed so that the monitors would reveal the portions of backdrop as you see fit.
Just to add my 2c:
There’s another setting in Dolphin to the set the wallpaper (for desktop, lockscreen or both) when you right click on an image file.
The right click on the desktop wallpaper option only sets the wallpaper on the monitor you do that on. The Dolphin option sets it for all attached monitors.
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