Dual Monitor setup - apps opening on wrong monitor

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Chrisblobster

24 posts

Geek
+1 received by user: 3

#294115 6-Mar-2022 13:39

Hi all,

I have a dual monitor setup on a Kubuntu 20.04 based home theatre / gaming PC setup - I have an NVidia GTX1650 GPU with HDMI, DP, and DVI, running latest NVidia driver - monitor 1 is a 4K 65" OLED TV driven via HDMI, and monitor 2 is my older AV receiver driven via DP - I've selected the 4K OLED as primary. The reason I have done this is because my receiver can only switch 1080p HDMI, and I couldn't get HDMI ARC to send 5.1 audio from the TV back to the receiver, only 2.0. I solved that issue by connecting a DP to HDMI adapter cable from the DP out to the receiver, so the TV gets pristine 4K video over HDMI, and the receiver gets pristine 5.1 audio over the DP to HDMI cable.

The issue is that it technically is a dual monitor setup (Kubuntu/NVidia driver/KDE Plasma see it that way) despite the 2nd monitor not being connected to a display device, and Kubuntu seems to like placing newly opened apps on the 2nd monitor, which I then have to right click on the taskbar entry for the app and select move to drag it back onto the 4K primary.

Does anyone know of a way to keep the 2nd monitor running (disabling it kills the 5.1 audio), but have apps open on the primary only, and possible even restrict mouse movement to the primary?

Googling for this was inconclusive, so if anyone has any suggestion I'm all ears 😁

Just to repeat, I'm running Kubuntu 20.04, the primary monitor is a 4K TV, secondary is a 1080p receiver placed to the right of the primary in display settings.

Cheers, Chris, Christchurch

RunningMan

9184 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 4834

#2879736 6-Mar-2022 14:09

Could you mirror the second monitor instead so it's displaying the same as the primary?

Chrisblobster

24 posts

Geek
+1 received by user: 3

#2879869 6-Mar-2022 16:47

RunningMan:

Could you mirror the second monitor instead so it's displaying the same as the primary?

I'm not sure that would work, as the primary is a 65" 4K OLED, and the secondary is... well, it's a receiver so it doesn't even have a screen but it reports back to the computer as being 1080p.

In any case I found a solution of sorts - a KWin script can be downloaded to force apps to open on the primary monitor, but some stubborn apps manage to ignore the script - the solution was also to upgrade from Kubuntu 20.04 to 21.10, as the newer KDE Plasma 5.22 shipping with 21.10 has a new feature that completely removes control of window placement from apps. Now apps will only open on the primary, i.e. where I tell them to! Or at least they will once I complete the OS update, as I added a 1TB SSD to the PC and am copying the steam games and other files across right now from a slow old mechanical 1TB 👍

Cheers, Chris, Christchurch