Hi all, I’m not sure this is the correct forum, but I’m trying.
Also, I think I should report this upstream, but I’m nevertheless reporting it here first to collect your opinions.
I am using TW on a Thinkpad T440 laptop everyday for my work. I use the laptop sometimes at home with no problems. When I get at work, the laptop is connected to its docking station so that it gains access to an external keyboard and mouse and two identical external monitors.
Although the external monitors are identical, one is connected to the VGA output of the docking station and the other is connected to the DVI output.
My problem is that after the recent slew of updates the behavior of the desktop (kde plasma5) is not reliable anymore. Previously, I had sometimes the problem that upon boot the right monitor would show nothing while the left monitor would show the right half of the desktop. Killing X with ctrl-alt-backspace-backspace and restarting the session would fix the problem (exiting with a normal logout usually did not work).
Now I almost always have the problem that the right monitor is black and the left monitor shows the right half of the desktop. No amount of killing/exiting and restarting the session would fix it.
I have tried messing with ~/.local/share/kscreen profiles, but they look correct. One time I have been able to fix the problem by switching to a virtual console before starting plasmashell, messing with the relevant kscreen profile without really changing anything, saving the profile and then starting the desktop. Retrying this kind of “fix” later didn’t give any benefit.
I have even tried physically switching the connection on the monitors (now I have DVI on the left and VGA on the right, previously it was the reverse) to see what would happen. To my amazement, I still had the image only on the left monitor, but this time it was showing the correct half of the desktop!!
It seems kscreen (or some other piece of the involved software chain) is messed up.
There are other problems when I connect/disconnect from the docking station, but for now I don’t want to overload you with too much information.
What do you think about my problem? Anybody experienced something similar?
Is it something to report upstream to KDE?
Thank you in advance.
Cris
p.s. When I say that the right monitor is “black” I mean that it dows not show the right half of the desktop: no background picture, no icons, no right-click menu, etc. However I can still move windows from the left monitor to the right monitor. I am using plasmashell 5.7.4.