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TL;DR: you can't present something on the beamer without hurting your neck or being constrained by today's restrictions: with a live preview of the beamer and the separation of two sets of virtual desktops, this sould no longer be a problem.

Hi all,

This idea is inspired by some issues myself and some colleagues from archlinux.fr ran into with dual screen.
Basically, nothing on planet Earth is able to deal intelligently with beamers, period.

If you face your audience, the beamer most probably points to your back and you can't see what happens in your back (unless you're not from Earth).

How do I deal with this and not break

• my awesome virtual KDE desktops
• my awesome audience's attention with some awesome transition effects

...?

Simple, backwards, genuinly simple yet frustrating solution: clone your laptop's output. Yeah, that works, OK. But that's not clever. That's old, too. Time for something new.
Expand your desktop? Yeah, it kind of works if you don't switch desktops (oh gosh, I'm so uneasy with only one desktop !). Also, well, you have to break your neck to see what happens in your back. Time for something ergonomic.

Main guidelines:

• Keep an eye on what's goin on in your back
• Hide what you want to hide from your audience
• Be able to interact neck-pain-free with what's on the beamer
• Continue using the virtual desktops

Ideas:

• Allow the user to pick a secondary display as "presentation screen"
• Create an intelligent application (the previewer) that can be moved freely on the laptop's screen and goes fullscreen when your mouse leaves the laptop's screen, so that you can see what happens on the beamer without any pain
• Allow different sets of desktops on the beamer and the laptop screen, so that you actually show only what you intend to to your audience.

What it should look like (drafty draft):

Any constructive input is appreciated, I'd appreciate explanations on downvotes.

Thanks for your suggestion!
I think I see your point and it is valid, indeed.
Nevertheless your final conclusion and suggestion appears somewhat complicated and overloaded to me, so here is an alternate suggestion:

Create an application with the sole purpose to mirror the live output of a physical or virtual screen inside a standalone window. That should do the trick!

This allows to define the presentation output (the beamer) by means already available as separate screen or as part of the desktop as already possible. Then, when that new application is started it simply opens a window and mirrors that presentation screens output. You can place that window wherever you like. Also a zoom and crop feature would be great and easy to implement. That way the application would not be limited to full screen sizes, so that you can make that window smaller and for example keep it on top of your "working screen".
The decision which output to mirror can be done either by launching options, or, easier, by initially pointing to the desired output. This would be similar to the "identify screens" feature in the screen management utilities. So in the end this will behave like a screenshot pplication, but providing "live screenshots"...