Wayland and multi monitor issues

Desktop Environments Plasma
1

Greetings all!

I was wondering if anyone else uses Wayland and has multi monitor issues.

For me, my default setup is:

Left monitor = portrait.
Middle monitor = normal.
Third monitor = my TV that appears and disappears (whenever I turn my TV on and off)

So, the problem is, every time I turn on my TV, my left monitor jumps to the middle and the TV resolution is switched to 1920x1080 (I have a 4K TV).

So, I fix it with display properties (and tell it to remember it for this config (also tried globally but no luck)).

I then turn my TV off and the same stuff happens. Gotta reconfigure again.

So I basically have to do this every-time I turn my TV on and off.

Curious if anyone else has the same issue.

Quirks aside though, I love Wayland, it’s so damn smooth (especially together with Wayland Firefox) and the fact I can have VRR while gaming and having audio through my speakers is reason enough to keep logging in to the Wayland session.

2

Have you looked at wdisplays in the AUR?

3

I didn’t knew it existed!

But after installing and launching I get “Compositor doesn’t support wlr-output-management-unstable-v1”

Installed plasma-wayland-protocols (although I don’t know what that does) but that didn’t fixed the issue.

Seems that program isn’t made for KDE.

I guess I shall see tomorrow when 5.22 beta comes out if this multi-monitor issue is fixed!

4

Portrait, landscape, 1080p, 4k and the occasional TV here. The setup has become stable even when turning on/off the TV. My recommendations:

  • Upper left corner of left most monitor should be at 0,0 (might be fixed in 5.22)
  • Plug in monitors to the GPU in “natural” order if possible to avoid “forced” configuration reordering
  • Remove the plasma display setting files (somewhere in ~/.config (?)) and start a fresh config
2 Likes
5

Re-plugging the monitors does fix the left one appearing in the middle.

unfortunately, now my taskbar is on the left monitor and seeing as a primary monitor doesn’t exist with Wayland (but maybe KDE will program something for it) I am going to have to wait for that issue to be fixed.

Still curious why Wayland decides to use 1080p resolution on my 4k TV (and forgetting that I changed it.

6

Nice, manually moving the panel seems to stick.

Edit: I did deleted kscreen config btw.

1 Like
7

Yeah, the “primary monitor” situation is rather unsatisfactory. If Wayland doesn’t have a notion of a “primary monitor”, then the desktop environment (i.e. plasma itself) should provide such facility.

Alas as far as I know this isn’t remotely on the table yet and the KDE devs are still working hard stabilizing basic Wayland.

But I’m very hopeful for the coming years. With Wayland and pipewire getting into shape, there’s no major architectural change on the horizon, and all the energy can be channeled into these quality of life improvements.

1 Like
8

Weird stuff, after having my monitors connected in the proper order, the middle one starts up black. I can see the mouse on it, but nothing else (what probably also doesn’t help, there is still a kernel bug where I can’t boot with 2 DP monitors connected, need to disconnect one, then when the login screen appears, I can connect it back, if I don’t I get a kernel panic).

Anyway, today I had issue getting it to work correctly, rebooted to x11, deleted kscreen config once more, arranged monitors there, and then rebooted, to Wayland and my settings where still correct…

My TV went on and off, there was a flicker, and settings are still sticking.

Very curious…