Cannot clone or mirror multiple screens in kscreen

[Sparhawk]

Kscreen does not allow you clone or mirror multiple monitors. The closest way is to make both displays the same resolution, then drag them over each other. They don't snap internally, so often I'm off by a few pixels.

Previously, kde-workspace-randr allowed you to do this by ticking "Unify outputs", but this package is not currently in the default installation of Kubuntu 13.04 (KDE 4.10.5).

Preferably, kscreen should include this option, as it seems that kscreen is better in every other way, but lacks this functionality.

(Alternatively kde-workspace-randr could be installed by default.)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.04
Package: kscreen 1.0-0ubuntu1~ubuntu13.04.1
Uname: Linux 3.9.4-030904-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.9.2-0ubuntu8.3
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Aug 19 11:41:30 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-12-16 (245 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Release amd64 (20121017.1)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: kscreen
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to raring on 2013-04-26 (114 days ago)

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

 Hi there!

Thanks for reporting this bug! Your bug seems to be a problem with the KDE program itself, and not with our KDE packages. While we appreciate your issue, it would be better if it was tracked at https://bugs.kde.org, so that the KDE developers can deal with this speedily and have direct communication with you as the reporter for more effective debugging.

Thanks!

[Sparhawk (sparhawkthesecond)]

No, it's a packaging issue with Kubuntu. As per my bug report, Kubuntu should install kde-workspace-randr by default, since kscreen cannot clone/mirror screens.

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

Right, so since you don't want to get kscreen improved I guess I'll mark this wontfix because we do not include duplicated applications and krandr largely duplicates kscreen and we chose kscreen to be the default.

[Sparhawk (sparhawkthesecond)]

Ah okay then. I suspected that kscreen was not designed to duplicate this particular important functionality of krandr, and thus they weren't *real* duplicates. I guess this categorisation depends on your definition of the threshold for "duplicate", though.

However, perhaps there is an argument to include krandr over kscreen, even if the former is more user-friendly. In my experience, at my workplace, I would think that most users (of other operating systems) would set monitors to clone much more frequently than any other option. Certainly many do use dual monitor setups, but this is usually "set once and forget". OTOH, giving presentations usually warrants using clone screen, and this is required to be set every single time.