Hello! The situation is as follows: I have 4 monitors - one built in laptop and 3 external monitors. Two of them periodically turn off. And almost every time I have it, widgets and panels on all monitors are knocked down. All this happens because the monitor number depends on the order of connection and this number is used in the lastScreen field in plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc, by which the location of panels and widgets is set. Prior to version 5.27 there was a handy mechanism for setting [ScreenConnectors] in plasmashellrc, but as of this version, that setting doesn’t work. I spent all night tonight trying to figure out what was wrong and only after looking at the source code did I see that this functionality was just cut out. Previously, even if something went wrong - I could quickly restore the configuration file or even manually correct the number, it was a matter of 5-10 seconds. Now, however, I am left with only 2 options to restore the correct location. The first one is to disconnect all monitors and connect them in the correct sequence. The second is to manually change lastScreen in plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc, which is extremely difficult for me because of the many widgets (the file is 1000 lines long).
Do you know if there is any alternative to the ScreenConnectors mechanism or was it just cut out and now I have to reconfigure the correct sequence all the time?
You only to change values of lastScreen once for each screen. You can use kate to search quickly the lines you want to change (Ctrl+F shortcut).
In the screen configuration, you can use the primary setting to change the order of the screen, like you would when disconnect screens. And you can disable/enable screens one by one so that they match the expected order.
You are facing this problem in the first place probably because you have two identical screens that use the same EDID (which is not standard compliant Extended Display Identification Data - Wikipedia).
I am not 100% sure but this issue may be prevented if those screens use different connector type
(HDMI vs Display port), that should help kwin distinguish them.
Btw X11 or Wayland ?
And you can test with the other kind of session, that might have a better behavior.
Oh, I didn’t see your message, sorry for the long reply
I know how to change lastScreen and I saw about the order of monitors too after I wrote the post. That made it a bit easier, but still doesn’t solve my problem. Also, EDID is not the cause of this problem specifically, I’m not sure how it’s related at all
I’ll try to explain. Let’s say there are 3 monitors(1 is A, 2 is B, 3 is C) each with a different set of widgets and panels. If I turn off monitor A, the order of the monitors will change and I will get an order offset(1 - B, 2 - C) and all widgets, then monitor B will have monitor A’s widgets and B will have C’s widgets, because the binding is not even to the EDID or output port, but to the order of the monitors. I used to be able to bind lastScreen to the output port via ScreenConnectors and it was convenient, but now it’s impossible. I understand that there is no alternative? Maybe you know some additional software that would perform the same function? Even binding to EDID would not be very convenient for me, because sometimes I connect other monitors and would like to get the same widgets on them that were on this port. But if there is a way to bind to EDID at least - I’d love to see such a method
Session X11 and I periodically try Wayland, but for some reasons it doesn’t work for me
I get severe freezes of the window minimization animation
Some of the applications I use stop working
I can’t set the screen resolution on one of my monitors because it has EDID glitched and can’t select the right resolution. This is solved through xorg.conf, but is not solved in any way in Wayland. I’ll reiterate that the problem now being discussed in the thread has nothing to do with EDID, as this behavior is easily reproducible without this monitor
I work at this computer and I don’t have much time to deal with the new bugs that have appeared in the new version. Also, as far as I know, a lot of widgets are not yet finalized to work on this version. Plus, the Wayland session doesn’t work well for me because of one of my monitors. And Plasma 6 is not yet in the Manjaro stable repository. I think this transition will cause me a lot more problems than periodically changing the order of monitors or manually changing lastScreen. I need my workstation for work, not to solve problems with the environment, so I try to use stable versions of software
Did they bring back the removed ScreenConnectors in Plasma 6, do you know? If they have - I will consider switching when it appears in my repository