I have originally posted about this on the Arch forums, but I am not allowed to post links here.
I’m using Arch linux, and have a single monitor connected by HDMI to an nvidia GTX 970, using X11 on the latest Plasma update.
When the monitor is either shut off manually or automatically by my power settings, windows across my virtual desktops are made smaller and moved into the top corners of the screen. A similar issue happens on Wayland, where instead the windows are all moved to the center of the screen.
Upon manually powercycling the monitor, all of the windows are put back into their original places. This mystery has been haunting me for months, even on KDE 5.
An arch forum user suggested I enable DRM, which did nothing to change the behavior. I should also include I have another video card that is being passed-through to a VM (If that can possibly affect things).
Thank you for any suggestions.
Sorry if I’m bumping this thread. I have the same issue and it’s baffling me too.
To give it a little more different data, my setup is a laptop running an external monitor. It is a bigger monitor than the laptop’s, and I use it exclusively. The iGPU is turned off in the bios, so both monitors are connected to the dGPU, the dGPU is nvidia. I’m running plasma on X11. Haven’t tested wayland. Distro is also Arch. Got 4 horizontal virtual desktops, all windows in them all get repositioned.
What I was conjecturing first was that the internal monitor re-enables whenever the external monitor powers down. Being smaller, the windows get repositioned. When I input anything, the external monitor awakens, and the monitors get disabled/re-enabled back, but the windows don’t get repositioned back to their original places.
Any suggestions are appreciated.
Thanks.
I’m not sure if this will help or not, but I had problems with windows moving around when hot-plugging DisplayPort connected monitors.
My solution was to disable KScreen2 in System Settings → Session → Background Services → KScreen 2. It seems KScreen2 responds to display hotplug events and redistributes windows to the remaining monitor(s).
(Because of signalling differences, only DisplayPort supports a definite hotplug - this results in a different KScreen2 behavior depending on how monitors are connected.)
Problem fixed for me in recent Plasma update (6.0.5-1)
I recommend updating to latest plasma (6.1.0-1) now for all others experiencing this strange issue.