Comment 12 for bug 201593

Without wishing to sound obnoxious, or ungrateful for the excellent work the Bryce Harrington and others are doing in this area; is it really the case that the latest version of the most popular Linux distribution on the planet is shipping with no way to graphically enable multiple monitors (for xrandr-enabled drivers)?

Surely even an applet with one large button that says "Enable all monitors!" which runs "xrandr --auto" (and maybe another button to switch between --left-of and --right-of options in case the autoconfigure picks the wrong one), as crude as it would be, would be vastly better than nothing!

Not that I'm saying I disagree with the decision to get rid of displayconfig-gtk. I realise that one data point proves nothing, but the only thing I've ever had it do is trash xorg.conf, requiring a "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg" before X would work at all. Goodness knows what people uncomfortable with the command line do; presumably, go back to Windows (which has had seamless on-the-fly dual monitor configuration since Windows **98**...).

NVidia users at least have a graphical configuration utility which, as I understand it, works pretty well. But ATI users like myself (not to mention Intel, SiS etc. users) are currently rather poorly served. (I realise the radeon binary drivers come with an aticonfig utility that you can use to get dual screens; I have tried it, and it was not a pleasant experience (many graphical glitches combined with frequent X crashes)).

Dual screens are a pretty mainstream option these days. Considering how hard it has traditionally been to configure dual monitors on Linux, it seems a criminal shame to not take advantage of how easy it now is with Xorg 7.3 and xrandr 1.2, to finally give Ubuntu users proper, working graphical configuration of dual monitors.