Agreed. Distinguishing between monitors serves no purpose. Like everyone else I have strong muscle memory to look to the top right of my screen when I want to see status indicators, or to look to the top to see the time, or to move my mouse to the top right to change the volume. This muscle memory has no concept of whether I am looking at my 'primary' monitor or not, and feels a half second of confusion each time I try to do one of these things on a second monitor, which is the hallmark of bad interface design. I think I'm subconsciously adapting to just not use the second monitor much, and that's a stupid outcome too.
Of course indicators have nothing to do with the specific monitor they're on, but they have nothing to do with the primary monitor either, so why are they there? They're there to give quick visual and interactive access to certain frequently accessed information and functionality, quick enough that you apparently don't want to have to hit a few keypresses to get them. By the same logic you shouldn't have to drag your mouse over increasingly large screen real estate. Unity had it right in this regard. There should be just monitors, no primary or secondary. It's a pointless distinction, and whilst I accept it might be technically difficult to achieve given the current architecture of gnome-shell, to insist on it as a design decision is silly. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to gnome-shell in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1682542 Title: Add support for top bars on all monitors to allow for multi-monitor support in primary extensions - apps-menu, places-menu, topbar, etc Status in GNOME Shell: Incomplete Status in gnome-shell package in Ubuntu: Triaged Bug description: This issue will effectively be a regression in desktop usage once Ubuntu switches from Unity to Gnome Shell. Gnome Shell does not work well with multiple monitors unlike every other desktop environment except Budgie, which is switching away from GTK/Gnome to Qt with Budgie 11 due out in the next month or two. I reported it upstream last month but it does not appear to have much traction at the moment. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=780078 " It would be nice if the primary included gnome-shell extensions, eg apps-menu and places-menu (and by extension the topbar) supported multi-monitor similar to how the bottom bar 'window-list' currently does. This was easy to achieve on Gnome 2 and now via MATE (out of the box) but there does not appear to be any way to do this with Gnome 3. This also leads to there not being a way to do this via 'Gnome Classic'. Even Windows finally (in W10) does this better out of the box than Gnome 3. BTW - Intel has supported IGP triple head since Ivy Bridge (2012) so it is very cheap to deploy a triple head system (~ $200 for 3 1080p monitors). AMD supports up to quad head in their IGPs. This has been blocking me from moving to Gnome 3 since its release and I finally decided to write a bug report about it. I have had all multi-monitor systems since prior to 2004. " And see comments #11 and #14 from Florian. " No, you don't want that in the extensions. Each extension is separate, so what you are asking for here is that apps-menu and places-menu *both* add top bars to non-primary monitors. We are definitely not going to add two or more stacked panels at the top. What you probably want instead is an option in gnome-shell to put top bars on non-primary monitors, and the aforementioned extensions to handle that case. " " Well, we've established what you want, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we'll implement it. So far the reasoning seems to be: - you really want the feature - GNOME 2 / Windows has it Unlike the case of the window list, nothing in the top bar (except for the app menu to some extent) is tied to a particular monitor, so there's a much weaker case here IMHO. (I'll also note that this wouldn't be a "cheap" option, but require work on lots of details throughout the stack - we'd need to figure out the overview (only include the activities button on the primary monitor? or allow an overview on any monitor?), get API to control the brightness of a particular monitor (rather than the built-in one), don't use "the monitor with the top bar" as indicator for the primary monitor in Settings, ...) " To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-shell/+bug/1682542/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
