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The list of pains this setup would cause is more than 3 (i.pinimg.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/funny@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

I don’t think this crazy number of monitors will be doable in KDE, but curious to know if anyone has done it without messing with like 4 different conf files.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    My guess is that KDE isn't the main problem. It's the video cards and drivers.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago

    Yeah, I build a 4 display setup for my son with 2 hdmi splitters and 3 almost identical displays ( model code in one was slightly different even though had bought 3 same displays ) and one older one from different manufacturer with same specs.

    Many desktop environments only saw 3 displays OOB. KDE was able to use 4, but it was unstable, especially with games and restart juggled the display order. Some trial, error and tweaking fixed most problems, but there was still some serious unstability due to different display models and spitters inability to fully reconcile differences. So, in the end it was a hardware problem.

    He still used that setup for a while.

    When my son settled on i3 desktop, solution was to buy a 4K TV and spit it to 4 displays with xrandr. Worked perfectly even with games (window borderless). He still set up a hotkey that made the 4 displays in to one, if some app/game didn't like the split.

    I took those 4 displays because I had a multi-device setup and I needed a new display and was tired of using HDMI switch.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    I have 6 monitors running through 2 very different GPUs on KDE right now, on the PC I'm using to type this. Works great, and I suspect I could add more monitors and more GPUs with no issues.

    ...

    ...

    Okay, granted, there actually are some issues. My issues:

    • It seems to depend on the distro. Kubuntu and Ubuntu Studio have been able to do it just fine, automatically configuring it correctly from the first boot; no other distro I've tried to date was able to make it work, regardless of how much I screwed around with things. All other distros I tried would only ever display through one GPU at a time; they could never use both simultaneously.

    • Using two very different GPUs is maybe necessary for it to work? Using two nvidia GPUs (1070 & 3090) didn't work -- it would only ever output from one GPU or the other. Using two Radeon cards also didn't work. But an nvidia 3090 and an old Radeon together? They both work perfectly, and are able to drive displays independently. (4 displays on the 3090, 2 on the old Radeon.) My motherboard doesn't have integrated graphics, so I wasn't able to test that. (Though it has more than 4 ports, the 3090 is only capable of driving 4 independent displays at a time, which seems to be a universal hardware limitation, hence the need for a second GPU.)

    • The system becomes unbootable (boots to a blank black screen) anytime GPU drivers are updated. That one really burned me the first couple times. The solution is to just not update the GPU drivers. sudo apt hold *nvidia* did the trick. (Yeah, I know that's not ideal. But it works.)

    But now that I've got the kinks worked out, it has been running flawlessly for me for years. Absolutely insane setup, including very different displays, different resolutions, different refresh rates, but it chugs along just fine and just kind of magically works.

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