Developer focus for Fedora workstation

[Adam Batkin]

On 08/17/2014 03:25 AM, drago01 wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 5:27 AM, Adam Batkin <adam at batkin.net> wrote:
>> [..]  and connecting/disconnecting external displays/projectors.
>
> Huh? This can't be any easier really. You plug it in  .. it works. The
> only thing we can do here is to make it plug in the cable for you but
> we lack hardware for that ;)

Maybe life is better these days - I'll be honest, I haven't run Fedora 
(or any Linux) on a laptop in a few years now.

However (and this is basically the same problem): On my dual-head 
desktop PC, when I launch a full-screen game, the game is fine (one 
screen shuts off and the other plays full screen, which is what I 
want/expect) but when I go back to the desktop, any windows that were on 
the "secondary" screen have been moved to the "primary" screen. I [think 
I] know why this happens, and I even have a workaround ("Return to 
monitor" shell extension) but this raises two questions:

1) Why did I have to go out and find, then install this extension? Who 
*wouldn't* want this behavior as their default?

2) The extension *seems* to work well, but behind the scenes, I know 
that bad things (i.e. things I don't want/expect) are happening to my 
session, and who knows what might be adjusted or reset that I'm just not 
noticing right now

FYI, that behavior is with Urban Terror (ioquake3). Steam is different - 
it doesn't mess with my resolution/desktops, but it also doesn't blank 
the secondary screen which is its own problem. Steam also doesn't seem 
to let me full-screen its menu system on my primary display, it always 
fullscreens to the secondary, even though games will launch fullscreen 
on the primary (and not blank the secondary).

And those are two of the more popular game engines. Maybe it's a bug in 
the games. But if those two engines, which are pretty popular, can't get 
it right, maybe a little work is needed on the platform side?

Maybe Wayland will fix all of these things, but Wayland isn't really 
here yet, plus I have an nvidia card with the closed-source driver, so 
my understanding is that I'm out of luck for a little while anyway.

I know we're talking "Workstation" not "Desktop" but I also know that 
one of the goals is that users should be able to do their general 
computing there too. So unlike the unwashed masses, I'm happy to go 
through a little extra trouble to make it work, but I'd like the end 
result to be that it works.

-Adam Batkin