Re: Panel behaviour under Xinerama

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik sun com>]

On 8 May 2003, Bill Haneman wrote:

> Jeff:
> 
> What you describe (Xinerama as a way to drag across screens) is, to the
> best of my knowledge, an interesting *use* of Xinerama but it is not
> what the Xinerama extension was originally created to do, it's (as hp
> alluded) an alternative view of Xinerama.
> 
> The problem is, these two views of Xinerama are in conflict.  "Good"
> behavior from one of these viewpoints will result in "brokenness" from
> the other.  My understanding of Sun's customer base is that they mostly
> take the "classic" view of Xinerama and an alternative might not be
> deployable by Sun to its customers.  Whether that applies to other parts
> of the GNOME user base (present and future), I can't say.
> 

I think this is a skewed view in that Sun, HP and others had for a long
time before xinerama cad, gis etc apps that supported multiple screens of
different sizes without any additional support, so probably only people
wanting to use multiple monitors as one large were interested in it. 

> - Bill
> 
> On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 15:55, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > <quote who="Bill Haneman">
> > 
> > > It's simple:
> > > With xinerama a maximize should maximize across the multi-screen area
> > > (because by definition it's only ONE screen).  If the user doesn't want
> > > that, then the user does not want xinerama, s/he wants multi-head.
> > 
> > That's not true. Xinerama has a very large usability advantage over
> > multihead in that you can drag windows between screens, it doesn't matter
> > where you start apps, and the entire thing feels like one coherent screen
> > (with a gap down the middle, so you also want them to grok that they are at
> > least a little bit separate).
> > 
> > Multi-head requires you to understand that there are two different,
> > independent displays, no matter how nice our GTK+ migration stuff is.
> > 
> > Xinerama is a hack to make stuff nicer and is very appropriate for "normal
> > people", multi-head is a more optimal solution that is a great choice for a
> > technical user who understands how it operates.
> > 
> > - Jeff
> > 
> > -- 
> > GU4DEC: June 16th-18th in Dublin, Ireland             http://www.guadec.org/
> >  
> >     "Stay away from my house, you freak! Can't you see that everyone is
> >              buying station wagons?" - Neal Stephenson, ITBWTCL
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> 
> 
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	Sander

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