Comment 267 for bug 668415

I found some information about planned multi-monitor support in 12.04, and how it would impact the Launcher. The bottom line is that the Unity team is dead serious about not making the Launcher movable. So, how are they going to solve the current bugs? By having the Launcher on all monitors!

The implication is that you would always want auto-hide turned on, otherwise you will be wasting space on all your monitors, not to mention having a very confusing experience seeing multiple Launchers at the same time.

And this bizarre setup, with an increasingly complex auto-hide/edge-detection heuristic, is supposed to involve less work than simply having a single Launcher which the user can place on any edge of any monitor? What do you think?

The document is here:

http://design.canonical.com/the-toolkit/unity-multi-monitor-interactions/

The relevant text from section 2.6:

"The Launcher is now available on all displays. Each Launcher contains the same set of application icons, showing both pinned and running applications. The same unfilled indicator arrow, used to identify applications which have all of their windows on a different workspace, is also used to identify applications which have all of their windows on a different display. Otherwise, filled indicator arrows are used, to show whether the application has one, two, or three-or-more windows on the current display. The behaviour upon clicking Launcher icons remains the same as in 12.04.

"Where the Auto-hide behaviour is specified (this is the default behaviour and can be changed from System Settings-User Interface), the Launcher will be shown whilst it does not obscure any windows, otherwise it is hidden and revealed by targeting the left edge of the display. When targeting a Launcher, the mouse cursor is held briefly at the left-edge of a display (as it passes from right to left across display boundaries), to make it possible to target the Launcher in Auto-hide mode."