Howdy folks, it's been awhile since I've posted to this here phlog
of mine.
Retro-computing is pretty interesting in general. Most people think
of the machines from their childhood or when they first started
using computers.
For me personally, that would mean Apple II's leading up through
486 computers and into Windows 95 and the like.
But one side effect of getting older is that a lot of computing I
did just 2 decades ago is considered pretty retro now.
In particular, commercial Unix offerings are pretty retro nowadays
even though I used them extensively when I first started working
professionally.
It doesn't seem THAT old to me but that's just what an older person
would say. Anyways, my first job back in the very early 2000s was
to maintain applications on an IBM Power5 based industrial control
system. The servers were running on IBM pSeries servers and all
the workstations were RS/6000 machines. Each RS/6000 had multiple
video cards in order to drive 4 monitors. These IBM branded CRT
monitors were honestly pretty unreliable but for me the idea that
a single user would even have 4 monitors to do their work was
mind-blowing. It's hard to believe for younger folks but the idea
that an office worker would even have 2 monitors was pretty novel.
There were even whitepapers written by monitor companies extolling
the virtues of having 2 monitors for workers to improve productivity.
Absurd nowadays but that was how it was.
Anyways, as befitting Real UNIX(TM), we ran the MWM window manager
and all the applications were written in Motif. It looked old
fashioned even back in the early 2000's but honestly it worked and
it was extremely stable.
When I first started working on AIX with MWM, I found the traditional
multi-monitor mode of X kind of strange. Before Xrandr (or xinerama)
having multiple monitors on X meant that each monitor was it's own
X display. So traditional window managers would allow you to move
your mouse between each monitor but each application or xterm you
would spawn could only be on a single monitor. This meant you could
not move application windows from one monitor to another which is
how all multimonitor modes work today. So if you opened an xterm
on one monitor and really wanted to move it to the monitor next to
it, tough shit.
close the xterm and re-open it on the monitor you need. I remember
thinking that this mode of multi-monitor handling was really
offputting after coming from the Windows world. In the early 2000s,
the average resolution of monitors was also quite low. This was
before HD resolutions or even widescreen monitors so even for these
highly advanced workstations, the resolution targets were really
1280x1024 or maybe 1600x1200 on the really monster CRT screens.
So with such low resolutions, being unable to move windows or xterms
from one monitor to another was really quite annoying.
However, today, I'm thinking that the forced separation of each
monitor being it's own X display is quite a nice property to have.
The original IBM power based control system was eventually retired
and like everything else in the world was converted to running
Linux on commodity hardware. In particular the operator workstations
are now running RHEL on HP Z workstations. The 4 monitors have
exploded to ginormous 28-30in LCD monitors running 4K resolutions
(scaled and magnified for readability).
So now we get Xrandr functionality and we can move windows and
xterms across as many monitors as we want.
But with each monitor having so much resolution, Does the traditonal
X multi-monitor mode start to show its strengths? You can have each
monitor dedicated to a particular task or application and you can
make application shortcuts that easily and repeatably open on
designated X displays. It also enforces focus and single tasking
for each monitor which can come in handy for operators or developers.
If you have only 2 monitors, then Xrandr mode is the most efficient.
If you have 4 monitors, then I think traditional X mode may actually
be better. I think for most people using 3 monitors, the Xrandr
mode is probably the best thing but if you are a real unix diehard
and spend all your time in Xterm, then I'd argue that traditional
X mode might still be viable.
Of course, the big caveat here is that you are using minimal window
managers like MWM, or Openbox and the like. If you are going full
Microsoft mode with heavy weight DEs like KDE and Gnome, then you
should just stay with Xrandr since that's what those desktops are
designed to use.
Anyways, can traditional X multi-monitor mode still make sense in
2022? Or do I just have OK BOOMER nostalgia glasses on and MWM and
Motif and X aren't as cool as I remember them to be?
EDIT: for modern video cards, running a separate X display for each
monitor port requires setting ZaphodHead options in Xorg configuration.
It appears that this mode is on the decline as there are many people
trying to get it to work and most modern DE/WM's have deprecated it.
However MWM and CTWM are still around and I think XFCE still supports
it. ah well.
