I recently added a secondary TV to my PC with KDE setup, in addition to the main monitor. I have it on a different position and angle and only turn it on for certain use cases, watching from different place. And I love the fact that I can create and build a dedicated panel with the widgets I want to have on that screen only. I don’t need every panel and functionality on that screen.
Just curious, is this something Microsoft Windows users can actually do? If not, this is something I would “advertise” for Linux.
OTOH, I’d love an easy setting to show a panel on all screens instead of copy pasting panels or making changes multiple times.
I agree. This was the first thing I was searching for, if there is a toggle to make my main panel available on all screens. Feels like this should have been the default behavior, to show the panel on all screens, unless told otherwise.
I have KDE on two of my computers but don’t really understand what you’re talking about. I keep reading though about the awesome paneling KDE has.
Can you explain more what you mean or give a link that explains? Maybe my use case is too basic but I don’t use anything beyond what I ever used in windows and I feel happy. However people talk about this all the time so I really want to learn
A panel is the top, bottom or left or right portion of the screen where you can add widgets. In example widgets to show list of current opened windows or time and date or a tray icon area. When I connected a tv as a secondary screen, it didn’t have any panel. So I created a panel and added only necessary widgets I need on this particular screen. I use my tv sometimes to watch films or documentaries in example, from a different place than my main monitor. These panels are very customizable.
The documentation at https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/Panels is a bit basic, but explains what panels are. A KDE developer did a video What’s Your Favorite KDE Panels Layout? talking for 15 minutes about this topic.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your response… It all makes sense now! I understand the excitement about these now
Does that panel only show up when you plug that specific TV in? Or does it come up regardless of the device?
Hm, the panel is only visible on the TV screen anyway. So it does not matter if the TV is plugged in or not, because without TV the panel cannot be seen or interacted with.
No, I mean if you plug in a second, different, monitor instead, does it show the panel.
Like is the panel configuration saved for that specific second display, or any second display regardless of device?
Just curious, it’s not that important and I could prob find out myself if I really cared to know
Ah I see, a good question! Didn’t think about this and will test it right now. There is a third monitor not in use, so I will unplug my tv and plug the other monitor in, and back off course. Wait a second please… (please standby) …
- so my first test was to just use the same cable on the same connection to my pc, unplug from tv and plug the hdmi cable to third monitor, result: no sadly its the same panel / bar that was configured for the tv
- second test is i unplugged the hdmi cable on my GPU, and plugged in to the motherboard, result: still same panel from tv
So my current conclusion would be it is not saved for the specific monitor, sadly. Maybe there is a configuration for this. It should be mentioned that my current KDE setup is not the default one and I have some customization that could have an effect on this maybe. The monitors and tvs are identified with their name, so KDE is able to tell the difference. Therefore technically it should be possible to have unique panels to each display. If there is no option for this, I might even suggest that in the KDE bug tracker. Very good question!
