Help keeping icons on primary monitor.

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lazarus

Help keeping icons on primary monitor.

Post by lazarus »

LM18.x x64 Mate

I've an ASUS laptop that I've just downgraded from LM19 Cinnamon to LM8.3 MATE for performance reasons. (Amongst other things.) It used to run LM18.3 Cinnamon quite happily, apart from slow desktop response, hence my trying MATE.

We have it hooked up thru HDMI to a big screen TV for media and with the TV physically being to the left of the lappy I've also set it to the left of the primary monitor (the laptop screen) on MATEs window manager. Purely to make moving the mouse pointer intuitive. ie. move it to the left off laptop screen onto TV.

All is fine, except that now MATE automatically places any new icons on the TV, even when it isn't turned on, which can be a right PITA.

So... two questions really.

1. Is it possible to tell MATE to only use the HDMI/TV desktop area when the TV is actually turned on?

2. Is it possible to force desktop icons to be placed only on the primary screen unless physically moved to the other? In which case, if they are moved to the TV screen and, on a subsequent reboot the TV isn't turned on, they're forced back to the primary?

Neither of the above were issues under LM18.3 Cinnamon and I'm not sure why they exist now. I'm assuming it is a MATE problem and not the install as it was installed via a newly created LM18.3 MATE liveusb and no errors were logged.

(Afterthought: I did install MATE as UEFI this time, whereas the previous incarnations of Cinnamon were installed as Legacy BIOS, but that shouldn't be responsible for this, surely?)
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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gm10

Re: Help keeping icons on primary monitor.

Post by gm10 »

You mean icons you create by right-clicking on the desktop? They seem to randomly go either on the monitor you click or on the primary, it's some sort of bug I guess. You can right click and "Organize Desktop by Name" to bring them all back to the primary, in case that's an option for you. If there's another way I'm not aware.
lazarus

Re: Help keeping icons on primary monitor.

Post by lazarus »

gm10 wrote: Sun Aug 12, 2018 3:22 amYou mean icons you create by right-clicking on the desktop?
Those, yes, and auto-mount devs such as USB sticks.
They seem to randomly go either on the monitor you click or on the primary, it's some sort of bug I guess. You can right click and "Organize Desktop by Name" to bring them all back to the primary, in case that's an option for you. If there's another way I'm not aware.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to work. I know MATE's icons appear on the left-most side of a multi-monitor desktop and could live with that... if the screen in question was always on.

On thinking about it, I guess my problem is really getting MATE to recognise whether or not the HDMI screen is powered or not. :?

Between that and the problems i'm having with sound I may just move back to Cinnamon. Pity, as MATE gives livelier desktop response times in almost every other way.
gm10

Re: Help keeping icons on primary monitor.

Post by gm10 »

lazarus wrote: Sun Aug 12, 2018 10:51 pm
They seem to randomly go either on the monitor you click or on the primary, it's some sort of bug I guess. You can right click and "Organize Desktop by Name" to bring them all back to the primary, in case that's an option for you. If there's another way I'm not aware.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to work.
Works for me. You may have to have "Keep aligned" checked.
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