The problem is as the description. No matter how many times I toggle on and off the “primary” switch next to the laptop’s internal monitor, and click “Apply”, if I ever drag the external monitor onto the “left” of it, that’s where the taskbar appears, where the app menu pops up, where all apps show by default etc. etc.
To the point where as soon as a monitor is dragged onto the left, THAT’S exactly the moment the taskbar appears on that monitor.
Effectively; the “primary monitor” is determined purely by the arrangement, and the actual “primary monitor” setting is ignored.
To illustrate, in both these examples, the “primary monitor” is the monitor on the lefthand side in BOTH screenshots, in spite of the “primary” star showing up on the “laptop” monitor on the right in the 2nd example, and you can see “LG Electronics” does NOT have “primary” switched on.
thats an issue with XFCE4… i see similar issues in cases… you need to set the panel to show on the display you want in the panel settings…
and in case it is better to use xrandr directly or arandr… and … in extra addition… lightdm the DM (login manager) also sets displays… i add display setup script in many cases to lightdm config (etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf) display-setup-script=/etc/lightdm/monitor.sh
monitor.sh is xrandr script generated with arandr… i use the same script for lightdm to match the settings with the running DE …
Thank you for the very quick response. I’ll try this again in about 2 weeks (it’s for a D&D session and everything’s already packed away) and let you know if it worked.
Ended up having to change Panel Preferences > Output to DP-2 (my newly set primary monitor on the right)
Why would we now need to hack in some script for default panel preferences to pick up that the primary monitor was changed? Surely this is a bug? One shouldn’t have to manually change the output dropdown or manually add another shell script or something for it to be picked up.
I don’t think it’s only a XFCE problem. I have the same issue with KDE. To fix it, I just cloned the panel to the right-hand screen and deleted it from the left-hand screen. The issue remains, in a minor way, with the login screen. It appears on both screens, but the cursor is on the left-hand screen. I can live with that.
True, but my point was that before I have a chance to use the mouse, the cursor appears in the “Username” box of the left-hand screen, even though the right-hand screen is defined as “primary”.
Yeah, because that’s where it starts the mouse position. It’s annoying for me because my left hand monitor takes a little while to wake up. I’ve learnt that I can just type and the password field is already selected though.
Maybe it would be better if it followed the primary monitor, although it wouldn’t make a difference in my case as the left monitor is the primary.
