This Week in Plasma: Virtual desktops only on the primary screen - KDE Blogs

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Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week something that I know a lot of people have been wanting for a long time was implemented: the ability to limit virtual desktops to only the primary screen! Thanks very much to Kristen McWilliam for this long-awaited feature, which arrives in Plasma 6.6.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/08/this-week-in-plasma-virtual-desktops-only-on-the-primary-screen
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This is the most exciting development I’ve ever witnessed. You’ve somehow managed to remediate Fedora’s gnome-abrt’s potential removal in F44 just as it became a problem. [1] [2] Thanks, Harald.

  1. lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/LYYR3EY4MYOLUHX4OFFSLS525WPTZVSN ↩︎

  2. lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/QJZI3HNIQM4SW7MZXFIKHWDYADNKE2S ↩︎

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To be more precise, the around 100 MB memory saving is for system with a 4K screens. For a full HD screen, which has a quarter the number of pixels, this will be 4 times as little. More subtly around fractional scale impact is detailed in the MR.

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I like the idea, but I don’t know how to implement it with Fluid tile - Auto tiling script for KWin. When a tile layout is complete, should the next window be added to the next screen or the next virtual desktop? I can also give the user the option to choose the behavior.

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While I really appreciate that this has been implemented (thank you Kristen), I’m wondering why this has been implemented in such an asymmetric way (primary vs non-primary screen)? With this current implementation, what happens when you change virtual desktops in one of the non-primary screens? Do the virtual desktops on the primary (and other non primary-screens) also change?

Why not treat every screen equally (symmetrically) and just simply allow virtual desktops to be changed per screen independently?

I’m surprised nobody brought this up in the merge request.

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Nice features! My workaround for all these years was to use the “Move to all desktops” feature. I would use that on the presentation, web browser, or whatever is on the external screen or projector, and then I could still move freely between virtual environments on my built-in (or primary) screen. Happy to test this new script when the Beta is out!

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Not sure what you mean, can you clarify your question?

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That is also a feature request, though far more complicated to implement. It is something we want to do though. See:

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