Hello dear Debian maintainers,
I've got a nagging issue with a 3-monitor setup and AMD card in Debian
Bullseye:
1) main monitor - HDMI
2) secondary monitor - HDMI (right)
3) ternary monitor - DVI (left)
When launching new programs, or opening settings, which are being
rendered as separate window, e.g. VLC settings, xrandr(?) prefers to
render them off the active main monitor, on the (switched-off) left or
right monitor, or, when viewing on the right monitor, on the
switched-off main monitor left of it.
This is pretty much alike on xfce, mate or cinnamon.
It requires to turn on one or both additional monitors, to get access to
the window in question, especially, when it's a settings panel, which is
not accessible from the task bar.
On Cinnamon, when trying to get an accessible off-screen window to the
main monitor via task bar (without switching others on), per right click
and "switch to monitor x", it usually requires 2 or even 3 times
repeating it (assumingly, until the internal device list sets the main
monitor as monitor 1).It becomes really cumbersome over time.
The expectation would be, that turned-off screens will be inaccessible
to programs, limiting their rendering possibilities to the currently
turned-on monitors, at least preventing them from creating new windows
and popups there, not necessarily pushing windows off-screen.
This problem now reaches back at least to Debian oldstable stretch, and
I had the same issues with older (AMD) graphic cards, too, but I
suppose, that's not a gc vendor problem, but the multi-monitor support
implementation and configuration in Debian/Linux.
I hope this can be corrected soon.
Best regards,
yuki