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I have been trying to get two screens with different resolutions to work in the configuration shown in the images below. Plain Ubuntu had no problems making them play well together, yet on my new installation of Ubuntu MATE, I get the following problem.

When the lower-resolution display is set as primary, the higher-resolution display appears to lose real estate.

In particular, even though you can move windows around on the entire screen, edge snapping will force a window into one of the three areas highlighted in the second picture. The rest of the available space goes unused.

Similarly, if you attempt to maximize a window, it will maximize to one of the same areas, as shown in the bottom two shapes.

This behavior can be tuned by scaling the x-axis through xrandr, allowing for more "usable" space, but it never looks quite right, and the scaling parameter has a max limit that prevents me from making it work that way.

If I set the higher-resolution display as primary, there is no such issue.

My machine is a Dell XPS 13 9670 Developer Edition that appears to not have external drivers to install. I'm currently running Ubuntu MATE 18.04. The problem does not exist with the shipped OS (Ubuntu 16.04)

What I mostly want to know is what causes the problem, and why it only happens when the secondary monitor needs to scale the UI up, but not when the secondary monitor needs to scale the UI down.

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1 Answer 1

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Answering my own question, in case it can help someone else.

I fixed the display problems by uninstalling xserver-xorg-core completely and then installing xserver-xorg.

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  • why was this the correct resolution?
    – Tom Kerr
    Aug 13, 2020 at 22:24
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    @TomKerr tbf I did not mark my answer as "correct". When I wrote the question, I was interested in an explanation of the underlying mechanics of the dual screen implementation that would explain why this problem happens. When I realized a different xserver package would fix it, I assumed it was either a bug or a package integration problem, and therefore thought it was an appropriate answer.
    – Guybrush Threepwood
    Aug 14, 2020 at 5:35
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    Sorry that sounded adversarial. I was dealing with an adjacent problem and was trying to understand the solution better. If I had known more reasoning it would have helped me see if it applied to my problem. That's why I asked, just really poor phrasing. Thanks for the explanation!
    – Tom Kerr
    Aug 21, 2021 at 2:08
  • @TomKerr no problem, all good!
    – Guybrush Threepwood
    Aug 22, 2021 at 22:10

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