Monday 8 June 2015

Elementary OS Freya - Desktop Switching with Two Monitors

Elementary OS Freya on Two Screens - Dolphin File Manager - and KIM (Right Click Image Menu)
Wallpaper - The Rocks - Nara Inlet, Whitsundays, Queensland Australia
Another one of my little annoyances with Elementary OS Freya has been solved.  I use two monitors and I often have related tasks across two screens on each workspace.  So my main workspace for example might be running my web browser on one screen, and either a video or a music player on the other.

Then I might switch to another workspace where I do my writing in Libre.  A third workspace might have whatever graphics I am working on, so GIMP or XARA or Inkscape might be on one screen along with Libre Office Draw, and my file manager and perhaps an image viewer on another screen.

The default setup with Elementary OS Freya was driving me nuts, because when I switched workspaces, only the primary display switched.  

Now, there are advantages to this, and one of them is that I can leave something like my to do list open all the time.  bt that can easily be accomplished by right clicking the title bar and choosing 'Always on visible workspace'.

Our friends at Reddit.com however have discovered the solution, and I'll paraphrase their answer here, because I am sure to forget it myself some time.

That behavior changed on Freya.  You can set it with dconf-editor. 
Go to org.gnome.mutter and uncheck workspaces-only-on-primary.

If you are using Elementary OS Freya and don;t see dconf-editor you should be able to find it in Software Sources, alternatively Google it and install it.
Once installed, if it doesn;t show in your menu, simply type dconf into the search box in your menu and it should appear.

Obviously if you want to switch back to having only the main screen swapping workspaces, just go into dconf-editor and check the box again.








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