Splitting a large screen into multiple virtual monitors

I’ve recently been using a wide screen (3440x1440) at work, and I’m thinking of getting one at home. The problem I run into is that having a large screen becomes inconvenient when sharing a screen with colleagues. Sharing a single window often isn’t an acceptable workaround, because often I need to switch between multiple applications.

It looks like this should be possible using xrandr, but while I am able to run the appropriate commands with out errors, it has no effect on the screen.

Given this initial configuration:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 3440 x 1440, maximum 16384 x 16384
DP-1 connected primary 3440x1440+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 798mm x 334mm
   3440x1440     59.97*+
   2560x1440     59.95  
   1920x1080     60.00    50.00    59.94  
   1680x1050     59.95  
   1600x900      60.00  
   1280x1024     75.02    60.02  
   1440x900      59.89  
   1280x800      59.81  
   1152x864      75.00  
   1280x720      60.00    50.00    59.94  
   1024x768      75.03    70.07    60.00  
   832x624       74.55  
   800x600       72.19    75.00    60.32    56.25  
   720x576       50.00  
   720x480       60.00    59.94  
   640x480       75.00    72.81    66.67    60.00    59.94  
   720x400       70.08  

I ran:

$ xrandr --setmonitor DP-1-1 1720/399x1440/334+0+0 DP-1
$ xrandr --setmonitor DP-1-2 1720/399x1440/334+1720+0 none

There are no errors, but nothing happens. This is running with Xorg;
I’ve tried the same thing with Wayland (where DP-1 in the above
becomes XWAYLAND0).

Is there any way to make this work?

2 Likes

@larsks have you found a solution? I’m in the same situation and just discovered xrandr does nothing on Fedora 38 with GNOME 44.