I have a feeling that I’m not the first one reporting the issue, but here it goes:
- I have a fresh install of Manjaro Stable Latest on my Intel laptop with Wayland (KDE Plasma 6.3.6)
- First time I plug in my external monitor, the taskbar moves to the external monitor. In display settings, the laptop monitor is still set to “primary”.
- I unplug the external monitor, the taskbar does not return to the laptop, it stays with the external monitor (making the laptop almost unusable). I’ll see it once I plug it in again. This lasts through restarts. Basically, the laptop monitor has lost its taskbar…
- With the external monitor plugged in, if I change the primary display to the external monitor, the taskbar switches back over to the laptop monitor which is then the secondary display… It seems, if there has once been a secondary display, the taskbar will always be at the secondary display.
- I worked around the issue by simply adding a second breath panel to the other monitor (and reverting the laptop monitor back to be primary monitor). But as these taskbars are different, changes in their layout don’t reflect on the other.
This leads me to the second issue. Desktop layouts. With a laptop with an external monitor, I can have three configurations: laptop only (1 screen), laptop open and external monitor (two screens), laptop closed and external monitor connected (1 screen).
- at first it seems that I can change the desktop layout for each of the three scenarios, they seem perfectly separate. So I laid out the desktops in each scenario and played around plugging the monitor in and out etc.
- It worked like 5 times. After that, all icons on the desktop(s) completely rearranged themselves, even spreading across monitors.
- Same goes for widgets. I seem to have to repeat widgets on the external monitor that I have created on the laptop monitor. They don’t automatically move to the external monitor. In the scenario with the laptop lid closed, the widgets appear in the center of the external monitor even though I’d expect them to be aligned right as they were on the laptop monitor.
These issues make KDE quite a pain to use with multiple monitors. A quick search revealed that the desktop layout issues existed already 4 years ago with Plasma 5. Why is it not being fixed? Or do I have to arrange the desktop(s) in a certain way for this to work? My workaround as of now is to not have desktop icons which is really annoying, too, and the the other issues still remain.
Any help much appreciated.