I’m currently on plasma 6.1.1, and running 3 desktops with 2x panels on each top and bottom, so 6x total. The three on the bottom I use for all the Icons-only Task Manager, System tray, etc for normal desktop widgets.
Now the problem I have is pinning applications on the Task Manager, I can only (usually) pin apps on one display to show up in the same place, which is odd to me. It annoys me to no end to have things in different places on every monitor.
For instance, of I pin Slack on monitor 2 Task manager panel with the electron app having been prior not pinned, it moves it to the front with the other apps, does not change monitor 1 or 3 bottoms with the same app taskbar and panel. When I try to pin Slack on display 3, it says it’s pinned now, but doesn’t move it to the front, and does not let me move it to the front.
Now some apps do this fine, such as Firefox, Dolphin, Keepassx (other electron app even), but not everything with flavors of native QT or GTK apps here. I can’t figure out why some do or don’t with what is in common.
It would be nice to have some sort of sync function or cloning of panels for multiple displays already. This is something I miss from Latte-Dock as well that I could copy my setup between windows for panels and contents.
Hi - I don’t have multiple monitors on a single device, so I can’t personally test this out, but just double-checking - do all of your Task Manager widgets on each panel have the same settings configured in the “Behavior” section (from right-clicking on the task manager, choosing “Configure Icons-Only Task Manager”, then Behavior on the left)?
Also, there’s some ongoing related work on this topic that sounds like it might help your use cases:
A feature going into Plasma 6.3.0 to be able to directly clone an existing panel to a different location: Bug report and merge request
Hi John, you were right - I did have them set a bit different. Thank you for that. I guess I didn’t realize they were individual settings for each panel vs. panel-type, though in retrospect with them behaving inconsistently I should have.
I suppose there’s something to be said for flexibility to adjust each individually per taste or functionality, but when I’m dealing with 3-4 displays normally, things like this are sure annoying when I’d really rather just have all the bottom or top ones behave the same.
One of the other problems with this is I’ve had making things worse is panels moving between displays periodically, as 3 of the 4 displays come via a Thunderbolt dock (lenovo, don’t buy one), and periodically it’ll glitch and change displays around, when I’ve had certain panels change display that were setup differently. It’s certainly been better than the multi-monitor mess on 5.27, but it’s still not great in restoring display to windows and panels every time.
The panel cloning will go a long way toward that at least the first time setting up, but it would be nice to have a more defined way of handling these like a profile you can easily switch between with settings for each contained. Latte-dock was nice for this as I could clone a setup, adjust the displays in the profile for if/when they did change, and just reapply it with the correct display arrangement profile.
Whoever is taking on the long-term approach, I would highly suggest they have a look at how latte-dock did it for consideration in mirroring that approach somewhat in Plasma. I used it under 5.x since cairo-dock went unsupported, and would now if it worked under Plasma6.