Setup has always been a very minor annoyance, but as a gamer who uses multiple monitors, Linux has been a simple no-go for me. I proselytize Linux everywhere, but is mostly just a development platform for me, because of this combination. I recently got on the Steam for Linux beta, and it's fantastic. But most games I have to play in windowed mode, and some I just can't play at all, because it spans across my two screens (with very different dimensions and resolutions). Sure, I could disable one monitor, but that's more trouble than it's worth, when I can still take advantage of my 2nd monitor just fine in Windows. In Windows, games only fullscreen on one screen, I can still see my gmail feed just fine on my second monitor.
Linux does a lot of things very well, but multiple monitors has always been a bit of a mess when fullscreened apps are involved.
I've found that's generally a program bug. When the programs try to find the root window, and create an OVERRIDE_REDIRECT window that covers the entire screen, they behave poorly.
They should be setting the EWMH fullscreen hint. To be honest, I haven't seen a program in ages that gets this wrong. Do you have any examples?
I'd have to get home and boot up Linux to try them out, but the ones coming to mind are Darwinia, Trine, and World of Goo. Is there a way that I, as a user, could manually set that fullscreen hint?
You could set the fullscreen hint yourself. The problem is that setting it on an override redirect window will do nothing, because override redirect exists solely for the purpose of telling the WM "Never touch this window." You would have to figure out how to make it use a regular window.
It's unfortunate. The mechanism to allow the WM to handle fullscreening intelligently is there, but it seems that the developers weren't aware of it.
Hmm, perhaps there could be another approach. Like lying to the certain applications about the resolution of the 'screen', to return the dimensions of the primary monitor, and then map coordinate 0,0 to the location we want the app to start at.
In addition to the display woes I find many of the games in the Humble Bundle grab all keystrokes. This means nothing happens when you press the volume keys, and most egregiously when you press Alt-Tab!
I've found things better when using Intel graphics than Nvidia. Of course no such problems on Windows at all on the same machine.
http://qubes-os.org/trac