Odd first window opening / placing behavior

M.Karrde · September 15, 2024, 9:55am

With the following Monitor layout:
Mon_3_26082024

(Blue numbers added for easier reference)
The very first application window after login, or after closing each and every window, is almost every time placed on Monitor 3.

Expected behavior: Windows open on the Monitor the Application is started on / from (if there is no windows rule for it which is not).

The second and any application Window opened after that follows the expected behavior but the first does not.

tldr:
1: Display (eDP): 2560x1440 @ 240 Hz (as 1706x960) in 17″ [Built-in] *
2: Display (DP): 2560x1440 @ 120 Hz (as 2048x1152) in 27″ [External] [HDR]
3: Display (HDMI): 2560x1440 @ 60 Hz (as 2048x1152) in 27″ [External]

Monitor 1 is my integrated Notebook Monitor and set as Primary display.
Monitor 2 is when “docked” (most of the time) my real main Monitor but I leave Monitor 1 set as Primary to separate my Mobile from my Docked usecase setup.
Monitor 3 is the least used one, has mostly a bunch of systeminfo widgets, clocks for different timezones and such stuff on it. And sometimes other usages.

All three of then have a KDE Taskbar on it, Monitor 3 mostly only for if I run fullscreen stuff on 1 and 2 to easily see if something is behind them.

It does not matter what Application I open first, most times it is the Web-browser or the E-Mail client but even if I open Kate or Konsole or LibreOffice Writer from the Taskbar/Starter on 1 or 2 it opens on 3. That I have to annoyingly drag down to 2 (or 1).
And with “almost every time” I mean in the last one and a half month it not happened maybe three or four times but I could not figure out the condition to trigger the correct/expected behaviour and next time it happened again. I waited this long for reporting this issue because I thought I could catch it but no.

And as a side note: what is even more funny, all windows closing animations go exclusively to the Taskbar on Monitor 3 regardless on which Monitor the Application is closed.

I have no windowsrules, except for some wine games, as I think it makes no sense to force things open for example on Monitor 2 and than take the Notebook with me and not have a Monitor 2.

Operating System: Arch Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.5.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2
Kernel Version: 6.10.10-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 32 × 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-13900HX
Memory: 62.5 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® Graphics
and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Max-Q / Mobile

M.Karrde · September 18, 2024, 7:13pm

Have to do some more testing, but I probably found a funny workaround.

If I, directly after login / after the KDE desktop popped up, right click somewhere on the desktop and let the context menu appear (for a millisecond), does not matter where even on Monitor 3 is fine, everything works as expected.
No annoyingly have to drag down the first window anymore.

Edit: Seems consistent, but I will not mark this as a solution as getting the habit of right clicking early on is just a, should not necessary, workaround.

M.Karrde · May 17, 2025, 7:24am

Have to bump that up again because after i thought it got fix or at least not noticed it anymore so far, it now got even worse.

Operating System: Arch Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.14.0
Qt Version: 6.9.0
Kernel Version: 6.14.6-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 32 × 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-13900HX
Memory: 62.5 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU
Graphics Processor 2: Intel® Graphics

After boot and login I can open Firefox or Konsole, for example, all day long from the taskbar Applicationlauncher of Monitor 2 (see picture in first post for numbering) and they open at Monitor 3, drag them down, do something in it, close them (at Monitor 2) , reopen them from the taskbar Applicationlauncher of Monitor 2 and annoyingly again they open at Monitor 3.

The rightclick at the start “workaround”, I mentioned, does not work anymore, very frustrating.

But now it even more weird, while i can do this with the 2 Application i mentioned above all day long, as soon as I start Thunderbird for the first time in the session it opens an the correct Monitor and any consecutive Application I start after that magically now opens on the correct Monitor as well. All mentioned Application native Arch, no Flatpack or Snap involved. What the?

Oh and as a sidenote: The minimizing Animation of every Window I minimize on on Monitor 2 goes still to the Taskbar on Monitor 3.

johnandmegh · May 18, 2025, 3:19am

Hi - I don’t have multiple screens myself, but just checking - what setting do you have in System Settings > Window Management > Window Behavior > Advanced > Window placement?

Does changing options there change anything about the behavior you’re seeing?

M.Karrde · May 18, 2025, 1:57pm

Currently it is set to “Centered”
Or it was, as I just set it to “In Top-Left Corner” and at least currently (after the magic Thunderbird is started “fix”) it is the Top-Left Corner of the correct Monitor.
But I will give that a more in depth test (probably) tomorrow evening when the system is freshly started and I have the time to do multiple restarts.
And report back after that.

Thanks.

M.Karrde · May 19, 2025, 4:23pm

“under Mouse” seems to be viable setting. Not as nice as centered but viable.

All other setting do what they say but not necessarily on the Monitor the Application is started from.

After some more testing it looks like it chooses the Monitor that had the last active Window on, even if it is no longer active at the time I start the Application rather than from where it is started. And for some unknown reason Monitor 3 is considered as the “active” after login (even if i choose a different one at the SDDM stage to login) and also after everything is closed. Witch is especially weird because, as a reminder, Monitor 1 is the primary display not 3.
Basically I started Thunderbird left that open (Minimized) on Monitor 2 as that is most of the time my mainly used Monitor, that triggered everything to open on Monitor 2 instead of 3 and I thought everything got magically fixed.

I noticed that when I forget to close a Application before shutdown that it always opens at Monitor 3 as well regardless on witch Monitor it was before. So maybe that gets fixed together with / automatically as soon the “session restore” wayland protocol I heard about gets finally implemented.

Edit:
Just noticed, running a inix -xxG.
That reports Monitor 3 as primary while in the KDE settings Monitor 1 is set on top of the priority list and is “marked” as primary:

And Monitor 3 (ASUS…) is for a reason at the bottom of that list as it is my least used (except for Widgets) Monitor. Maybe whatever is going on there plays into that strange Monitor 3 seems always to have the highest priority after login as well

shadow · May 26, 2025, 4:36pm

I do not have a solution, but came here to post about the same issue. Applications in Wayland will not open on any but the primary screen. Some applications will remember their size and position on the main screen, but some, like Firefox do not and always open centered. Like you, I find it a pain dragging windows around every single time I launch them. I only use one task bar as using more than one seemed to compound the problems.

They all open where they were last set in X11 as expected. This is not a new issue with Wayland - been a problem for many years, but I was hoping there was a solution to it finally.

M.Karrde · May 27, 2025, 6:48pm

It is not even the primary or in Wayland terms the highest priority screen in my case, at least not the KDE setting highest priority one.

X11 had its issues too, I handled that with a hotkeyed script that toggled the primary between Monitor 1 and 2. But if it not even depends on the priority that is not possible here.

It seems, according to a (granted only fast and not very deep) short search, the Monitor priority thing is not even a wayland standard but every DE cooks its own soup with that(?).
If that would be the case no wonder Application do there own thing as well.

Anyway, whatever, The “under Mouse” setting works for me, kinda. Am I happy with it? As I almost always catch myself dragging the newly open window into the center manually to match the “old”/default setting if it would apply to the correct screen, probably not fully.
Maybe a Windowrule that applies to all freshly open windows and centers them on the screen the Mouse pointer is on would be possible? But that would nearly be a workaround for a workaround.