Wayland monitors.xml interaction with xorg monitors.xml

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I have a three monitor setup. I configure monitor order and orientation etc in gnome settings under wayland. Logging out and logging in, again, in a gnome session then correctly employs the settings. I guess (but please correct me/confirm) that the settings are saved in ~/.config/monitors.xml.
However, when using GDM to log into an Xorg session, I get a mismatch of displays and monitors - orientations, order etc are forgotten, the mouse pointer is not shown where the system interprets it to be acting, etc.
So: where does wayland store its monitoring settings?
should(n’t) the monitor settings be “translated” between wayland and xorg sessions?

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It should be the same config.
Check the diff when you configure displays from Wayland and Xorg.
Perhaps the problem can be work around with a simple profile script that manages the config based on the XDG_SESSION_TYPE variable.

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By the way I just consider other configuration. Is it possible to start (on one monitor or many) KDE and Gnome independently ?

4

Running GNOME and KDE simultaneously requires to open multiple sessions.
It should be more or less possible with the following approaches:

  • Remote desktop
  • Virtualization
  • Multiseat

Although, there’s typically no need to run more than one session per user.
You can simply use both GNOME and KDE apps in a single session.

6

I know this possibilites and I know I can run KDE apps in GNOME and reverse. I can even log out KDE and log in GNOME in Fedora. However I feel KDE and GNOME as different beasts useful in some different scenarios and believe someday it will be possible to switch desktops as virtual terminals (ALT+CTL+F)

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My experimenting results in this

  • the difference between monitor.xml files for each system, each generated from scratch (i.e. starting gnome in each mode without monitor.xml), is this: different y coordinates.
  • starting xorg initially gets me a distorted display and non-functional mouse (as described in my initial post).
  • to get an xorg config that works, I first have to define all displays as working in landscape mode.
  • manipulating monitors.xml does not automatically translate into changes of the display after logging out and back in. I guess this implies that gnome-settings also stores display coordinates, etc at a second location.

Ok, next step for me is to define a script as you recommended, will have to research how to do this

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@vgaetera, if I may ask: how would such a script look like? Or, what lines would I add in .profile, to point make xorg use a different monitor-file than wayland?

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touch ${HOME}/.config/monitors.{wayland,x11}
tee -a ${HOME}/.bash_profile << "EOF" > /dev/null
if [ "${XDG_SESSION_TYPE}" = "wayland" -o "${XDG_SESSION_TYPE}" = "x11" ]
then ln -f ${HOME}/.config/monitors.{${XDG_SESSION_TYPE},xml}
fi
EOF
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