Why doesn't plasma have an option for spanning wallpapers?
Why doesn't plasma have an option for spanning wallpapers?
Why doesn't plasma have this feature? I'm pretty sure there is a technical reason. This is pretty much the most customizable DE in existence, and missing a small feature like this seems odd to me.
I don't think there is a technical reason. Simply no one was interested in implementing it yet. See Nate's answer over at reddit and the associated ticket.
So once someone is motivated enough it will happen. But without contribution or extreme boredom by the core mainteners (haha) it won't happen.
I want to take a shot at it, but I have zero idea where to start. Is there a guide on how to contribute to plasma? I've never done such thing. For now, I have forked superpaper and made it work with Wayland and I'm using it, but it would be nice to have that feature built in plasma
For those that don't wanna go to reddit.
Nate's answer:
Because nobody implemented it yet. :)
wallpaper cannot span multiple screens
Most other DE's and even just regular WM's when used with feh can use a single large wallpaper spanning multiple screens, eg 5760x1080 for triple head. KDE 5 however can not do this and it also blocks feh from working as well. This used to work with KDE 3 and earlier but appears to have broken since then with the rewrite.
I wasn't sure which component was the better fit, Image Wallpaper or Multi-screen support so put it under Image Wallpaper since that is likely where it needs to be fixed.
Doesn't seem incredibly straightforward to me, since screens can be set up in any configuration relative to each other. You pretty much would have to implement multiple options to make everyone happy, at which point it's not a small feature anymore.
it is straightforward. The system already knows the resolution and relative position of each screen, it’s how it renders a seamless desktop across monitors. Spanning a wallpaper just means treating all screens as a single canvas and cropping each monitor’s visible section from the full image. It’s no more complex than setting one large background and letting the compositor split it accordingly
Sure, that's one approach. But there's probably a bunch of people that have multiple screens layed out horizontally with slight vertical offsets, and they'd probably prefer the wallpaper to be assigned as if they were in one row.