Please support a completely black second screen

[Benjamin Drung]

Please support hiding the Unity panel if no application is shown on the screen. Having the panel always shown breaks my use case. I have two screens. The first is connected with a TFT and the second with a beamer that is used for presentations. In GNOME 2 I removed all panels from the second screen and set the wallpaper to black. That gave me a complete black screen when no presentation was shown. I like to create the same setup with Unity.

(Better) description from the duplicate bug report:
Unity secondary monitor menubar is an unconvenient setup for video art and gigs, and generally where the secondary display output is used with projectors in live shows.

While bug #907464 and bug #748539 are aimed to mitigate this issue solving at least a problem with fullscreen apps, that's not really a "projection mode" where most people really want to display just black on the secondary monitor even when there's no app on that, no menubar and no notifications should be displayed there.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

the pain purpose for the panel in secondary screen is so that there are menus visible since we use "Global Menus" in the panel. showing menus within app is not an option. You have any suggestions?

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

The suggestion is to have an option to hide the panel on a display if no application is shown on that display.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for unity because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for unity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, in precise you can configure from the display capplet on what screen(s) the launcher should be displayed, that doesn't respond fully to your request but in fullscreen the panel should be hidden and it doesn't have private infos that should disturbe a presentation. Still a valid wishlist though...

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

Here's a screenshot of the three monitor setup. Instead of showing the Unity panel, the third monitor should be completely black...

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

...unless a presentation is shown.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 748539, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

Daniel, this bug is not a duplicate of bug 768539. This bug is about not showing the menu bar if no application is shown on the display. Bug 768539 is about the menu bar appearing over an full screen application.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Benjamin,

The enhancement you describe is totally unnecessary if and when we fix bug 748539, which is definitely a bug. When that's fixed, any application going fullscreen on the second monitor will always hide the panel etc. So this bug is at least Wishlist if not Opinion.

[Benjamin Drung (bdrung)]

Daniel, I don't think that this wishlist bug report requests an unnecessary feature. I do not want to see the panel on the presentation screen if there is currently no presentation running. The presentation screen should never show UI elements from the operating system.

[htrex (hantarex)]

This enhancement is needed for sure in live show environments.
We can't use Ubuntu with Unity in gigs and generally in any other place that's not an office environment.

In a theatrical show or a concert you never want to risk displaying any OS interface element in any case, never ever, there are poetics requirements there!

Hiding the menu bar when a full screen application is running is not enough, we never know what's going to happen in a live show, a scheduled scene may suddenly change for any kind of problem, we may need to relaunch an application with different parameters, our experimental applications may also crash, and we are subject to human errors too... in any of these cases a black projected canvas is the most desiderable transitional failure! ;)

I'm all for an option to disable or hide launcher, menu, notifications and any possibile OS interface element from secondary monitors.

[Ciro Santilli 六四事件 法轮功 (cirosantilli)]

Superset: https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/853865