14 DAY TRIAL // One of the difficult problems that the Ubuntu developers need to solve is multi-monitor support for the Unity 8 desktop environment, and it looks like it’s already under way.
The Mir display server has been in the works for quite some time, and it was supposed to be default in Ubuntu a long time ago. The team quickly realized that it’s not going to happen, and they postponed the launch for the desktop. In fact, when Canonical decided that Mir still needs a lot of work before becoming default, one of the developers said that one of the issues that were still problematic was the support for multi-monitor systems.
An Ubuntu user posted a message on the mailing list with this exact problem. Keeping the windows in place when another monitor is connected or disconnected is a pain, and it can’t really be fixed right now, not even in X. Ubuntu is trying to move on to Mir, but it looks like Mir doesn’t provide information about the global coordinate system. A solution is still needed.
Multi-monitor support is important
A few years ago there were fewer people with multiple monitors, but that’s starting to change. Linux is not the friendliest platform when users try to connect a second or third monitor and managing them can be quite annoying. Canonical knows this all too well.
“However, as the consistent placement of windows (in multi-monitor scenarios) has been requested numerous times for the current version of Unity, we decided that Mir should offer support for it out of the box. IIRC, the implementation is work-in-progress, and we are certainly happy for all sorts of contributions (testing, code, ideas and reviews),” Thomas Voß, one of the Mir developers, wrote on the mailing list.
Mir is expected to arrive as an option in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and by default in Ubuntu 16.10, but neither of these is a promise. Canonical got burned before. It’s also not only up to Canonical and both Nvidia and AMD still need to provide support through their drivers.