I'm experiencing a bit of a quirk with my desktop setup. I wasn't sure whether this was a KWin issue, or a plasma one.

My setup is that I have two monitors, but I mirror the display. Under "System Settings"->"Display and Monitor"->"Display Configuration" I have unified outputs.

Most of the time this works great, but I've noticed that if I use Alt-Tab (or "Walk Through Windows" shortcut) and I Alt-Tab to the "Show Desktop" entry, I get switched to a different desktop! I can Alt-Tab between them and change settings for each, setting different wallpaper so I can tell them apart.

What appears to be happening is that normally when 2 screens are present, I will have two desktops. These can have different wallpaper. When I unify the screens together, the 2 desktops are merged to the one screen instead of removing one of the desktops.

This can be rather confusing, as all my plasma applets, desktop shortcuts and wallpaper can change from when I reboot, depending on which desktop I am viewing when I restart.

If I remove the HDMI to my second monitor, this issue disappears.

Is there any workaround for this? Has anyone else been bitten by this quirk? (Is this even KWin's quirk? I'm happy to open up this topic elsewhere!)

Well, I found a way to stop me being able to alt-tab to the other wallpaper (a patch on c3af4c3):

Code: Select all

diff --git a/tabbox/clientmodel.cpp b/tabbox/clientmodel.cpp
index d060c09..6065754 100644
--- a/tabbox/clientmodel.cpp
+++ b/tabbox/clientmodel.cpp
@@ -228,7 +228,7 @@ void ClientModel::createClientList(int desktop, bool partialReset)
         m_clientList.removeAll(c);
         m_clientList.prepend(c);
     }
-    if (tabBox->config().showDesktopMode() == TabBoxConfig::ShowDesktopClient || m_clientList.isEmpty()) {
+    if (tabBox->config().showDesktopMode() == TabBoxConfig::ShowDesktopClient) {
         QWeakPointer<TabBoxClient> desktopClient = tabBox->desktopClient();
         if (!desktopClient.isNull())
             m_clientList.append(desktopClient);


But I'm still a bit sketchy in understanding which wallpaper/plasmoids I'm going to get on a startup. It's not really solving the underlying issue.