I’m not sure if this is in the appropriate place? if not please change it to the correct one.
Over the years I have run may Linux flavors, but almost all of them have been KDE DE.
and It seems I only have had this issue with KDE, but talking to KDE people say I need to ask this question here.
I have some weird bugs with multi monitor setup 2/3 monitors. they all but up and work as expected the first time I boot the computer.
but if I let it go to sleep or lock screen comes on, everything either freezes or the monitors looks like they have been broken with just a bunch of colors/lines and pixels . I have to force a reboot/restart to be able to use the computer again.
the reason I thought it was a KDE thing is, this only happens when using KDE DE.
I really like it and don’t want to move to Gnome.
Computer spec:
Ryzen 3950X
Radion Vii
MSI Unify x570
Sabrent m.2's
1x LG 27" 4k monitor
2x innocn 27" mini-LED 4K
If I only use 1 screen I have no Problems like this ever, but as soon as I plug in the other two I get the same result. so now I’m trying only 2 monitors but same result again.
anyone have any Idea on how to make openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE desktop stable/usable with multi-monitor setup?
I think we need to know which KDE DE you use : X11 or wayland?
I have a system with two identical monitors connected to a nvidia quadro K4200 GPU and I use nouveau.
I had some problem with the wayland session but all worked corectly with X11.
It’s possible they may straighten themselves out if you switch out of X and then back, using Ctrl-Alt-F4 to leave, then Alt-F3, Alt-F2, Alt-F1 or Alt-F7 (whatever matches where SDDM put your X session) to return.
You can try disabling Kscreen 2 in background startup settings. Arandr can be used to create a startup xrandr script for the purpose, instead of the convenience of Plasma desktop settings, to setup relative display position and priority if they aren’t to your liking on their own without the help of Kscreen 2 working in the background like it’s supposed to.
You didn’t make clear which KDE people suggested you come here, or whether “here” meant specifically to openSUSE or just to your choice of distro rather than from KDE’s own forums or mailing lists. I suggest to download and burn KDE’s own distro called Neon. You can run it in live version mode rather than installing. Then if you can reproduce the same problem running Neon, you will have proven it’s something KDE needs to provide a fix for, because it’s not specific to openSUSE.
You may be able to avoid the problem to significant degree by maximizing time for power save engagement at 120 minutes, and disabling screen saver. It may be possible to use my prior suggestion of switching out of X when you anticipate it going to sleep due to planned or expected inactivity. On return from elsewhere to become active again, wake all three displays via Shift or Xtrl or Alt prior to using Alt-F3 or whatever works for returning from vtty to your Plasma session.
Gnome is not the only alternative to KDE. Most TW installations include IceWM as an alternative, and very lightweight, session type. You should at least try it to confirm your hardware is not the issue if you haven’t already tried that using Gnome. All that’s necessary is to select IceWM as the alternate session type at your regular login screen. It’s few packages should already be installed and ready to use. Other types available for TW installation include among others XFCE, Cinnamon, Budgie, Mate, KDE3 (via optional repo), LXQt, LXDE and Deepin.
@av8r Could be this is a radion gpu problem. I am using nvidia for the longest time and never had this kind of problem with multi monitors. I used to be using 3 monitors all the time. When I upgraded to bigger monitor I remove the third one. I am an xfce user and in xfce there is a way to set profile of your monitor setup but never used it because I never encounter a problem regarding my set up. I do sometimes use kde to see what’s new and never noticed a single problem with my monitors in x11 and in wayland.
I’m no longer sure it’s a KDE problem, but maybe a combination of openSUSE and KDE, it does not matter if I use X11 or wayland. I have done a clean install straight out of the box of oSTw with btrfs, all default settings from the installer and it still keeps happening. except for every now and then It works as expected,.
but for 95% of the time if monitors lock/turn off/ or computer goes to sleep I have to do a hard reboot, utilizing the power button on the computer.this started happening after kde 5.27 I believe when it started to become bothersome.
I really dont want to leave oS or KDE due to it being my favorite distribution and DE. but I have no problem when is switched to EndeavourOS with kde, Fedora with KDE, or openSUSE TW-GNOME. but I cannot stand Gnome, due to the file manager,and not possible to change it and a few other reasons.
I would really like some help figuring this out if anyone can, I appreciate it a lot!
It isn’t a solution but in meantime in plasma, I assume adding the power management widget then toggling “manually block sleep and screen locking” would make things a little less painful. Alternatively, disabling screen locking in plasma then systemd for sleep stuff but above seems easier.
-Probably you’ve already done some version of this based on your description but I thought it worth mentioning.
It is a little strange that you see it with a simple screen lock. In “screen locking”, if you set screen lock to like, one min set “allow unlocking without pass for” to 1 or 0 seconds and allow it to lock then immediately try to unlock it… you still have the problem?
btw, I’m on a 2 monitor setup with mix of portrait and landscape on 2 desktops one intel arc and one w amd and haven’t run into problems in tumbleweed recently.
I have not tried the widget but will now. But I turned off go to sleep and Lock Screen.
I’m gonna try this < you set screen lock to like, one min set “allow unlocking without pass for” to 1 or 0 seconds and allow it to lock then immediately try to unlock it… you still have the problem?> and see what happens. I appreciate the tip.
DP can behave differently to HDMI/DVI - something to do with the idle signalling. I think with DP, when a DP monitor changes to “off”, KScreen2 will try to move any windows residing on it to other monitors - this is to deal with the situation where someone hot unplugs a monitor from a laptop. I believe it’s harder to determine what exactly is happening in the case of HDMI/DVI, so no action is taken.
Anyway, it could be worth seeing if a different kind of connector changes the behaviour.
When you say go to sleep, to you mean the PC goes into standby/hibernate? I disable suspend/hibernate, I just have my monitors go into power saving, but the PC stays fully up. At some point in the past I did experiment with suspend/hibernate, and I think I did see graphical weirdness on restore - but that would have been with Nvidia, and I’m not sure I had the nvidia save/restore stuff properly setup.
When you say monitors turn-off/go-to-sleep. Does this happen if you just turn off a monitor and then turn it back one (while the PC remains fully up)?
I always disable KScreen2 because I scale monitors individually under X11 (I scale using xrandr, which causes conflicts with KScreen2).
DP can behave differently to HDMI/DVI - something to do with the idle signalling.
I did not know that, guess I have to buy a KVM switch and see, My Radeon VII only has DP outputs.
KScreen2
Says it’s off under sessions → background services, but is check-marked. I’ll try and uncheck it.
When you say go to sleep, to you mean the PC goes into standby/hibernate?
Afirm, when the PC goes into standby/hibernate. I will try and turn off suspend/hibernate and see again
When you say monitors turn-off/go-to-sleep
I have not tried to just turn off a monitor but will try it now, once I’m done writing. then come back and update just in-case it does the same thing. #update - Yes it does still happen if I just turn off a monitor, (PC firefox turned into rainbow colors and pixels and desktop became unresponsive.
I have now installed microOS kalpa just to see if it made a difference. and it actually seems to be happening less. but have not fixed the problems fully, (it’s down to about 40% of the time now, instead of 80/90%)
Sorry this is not like any issue I’ve experienced.
Given you say the problem is with KDE, I assume the problem does not happen with gnome or just something simple, such as openbox?
You reported you have no issue with one monitor. I see you have 3x 4K monitors all on DP, and two at 160Hz. I’ve never tried that many high spec, high resolution, high frequency monitors on any GPU. I’ve read that the Radeon VII supports up to 4 DP connected monitors, but I’m not sure if that’s limited to 60 Hz or if/how-many can be higher than 60 Hz.
Sorry to keep pestering you with things to try, and feel free to ignore my guess work, but:
Have you tried reducing the number of connected monitors to two?
Have you tried reducing the operating frequency of the monitors to 60 Hz (if that’s possible - I suppose it might be possible via cabling, would DP-HDMI be 30/60 Hz).
Beyond those ideas, your setup is way beyond mine in spec, so I will stop speculating in order to avoid wasting your time. Hopefully someone with a similar setup will chip in.
I appreciate all the help you can give. I have tried with just 2 monitors, and same behavior. But I had an update today zero. And now when I turn off kscreen2 and have turned of computer and monitors to go to sleep. It seems to be better. It will let me unlock the monitors and continue working. But I don’t like the computer running always, due to power consumption. But this is a workaround.
Another stab in the dark then. I find it’s always a good idea to create a new user account and check if it has the same problem. That eliminates the possibility that the problem is due to some cruft in a config file.