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Ok, I've just tried my 12.04 / Unity laptop with my 22" monitor. The thing is, I have my laptop on the left, and 22" on the right. So I want to set the Unity l

Ok, I've just tried my 12.04 / Unity laptop with my 22" monitor. The thing is, I have my laptop on the left, and 22" on the right. So I want to set the Unity launcher to the right hand side of my main screen, the 22" display, so that it doesn't get in the way of scrolling to the laptop's screen. Sounds simple right? Switching the launcher from left to right? Wrong. http://askubuntu.com/questions/123552/unity-launcher-on-right-side http://askubuntu.com/questions/123552/unity-launcher-on-righ... In short, I'm advised to switch to a whole different desktop manager for that simple functionality. What a crock of shit. I still like it for laptops, but this inflexibility ruins it for multi-displays. BRB, installing another desktop manager... A few more links on the subject: https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/740391 https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/740391 http://askubuntu.com/questions/33605/can-i-move-the-unity-launcher http://askubuntu.com/questions/33605/can-i-move-the-unity-la... https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415/comments/2 https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415/comments/2

revorad 14y ago
What machine (and config) are you using?
- cryptolect 14y ago
  Lenovo X220. Standard Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity. Laptop display configured for left, 22" configured for right. Because I have launcher configured for auto-hide, every time that I scroll across to the left to reach the laptop display, the launcher gets in the way, hence I want it on the right. I've read some of the other comments below and I've decided to try gnome-classic instead. It's a pity, because I really wanted to fall back in love with Ubuntu. I can't believe they didn't make it configurable to switch which side a bloody launcher is on. Sure, have your defaults, but make them configurable.
  - akavlie 14y ago
    I'm curious: how long have you been running Ubuntu on your X220? And how stable has it been? I was using Ubuntu on an X220 as my development machine for a while, with Ubuntu 11.04. It was extremely unstable -- the machine would freeze frequently when unplugging the DisplayPort cable, or even right in the middle of working. That along with a host of small bugs and annoyances (invisible desktop space on the smaller display in dual-display mode -- a longstanding issue in X apparently) eventually drove me back to using a Mac.
    - fingerprinter 14y ago
      X220 here. I had some problems with the trackpad in 11.10 (I use the nub, mostly). 12.04 has been nothing but rock solid the entire way. Everything including the above that you said is a problem. Sorry that I can't commiserate, but basically, the X220 + 12.04 are the near perfect setup I've wished for quite some time* *only thing I would like is a higher resolution screen on the X220.
      - cryptolect 14y ago
        I agree on the higher res desire. It looks so great out of the box you just wish you had a little more screen real estate to work with...
    - cryptolect 14y ago
      Until a few days ago I was running Fedora 16 (KDE) on the X220 and it ran perfectly. Ubuntu 11.04 was why I moved to Fedora in the first place. On the X220, 12.04 has run perfectly. On the X120e however, which also ran Fedora 16 (KDE) previously, I have to admit that 12.04 was sluggish. I haven't narrowed down the problem - but I feel it might have something to do with graphics performance -- which feels strange, since I always historically associated KDE with sluggish performance due to graphics, not Gnome.
    - AncientPC 14y ago
      Hooray X220 owners! I ditched 11.04 for Arch, running Gnome 3 in fallback mode with Xmonad. Gnome 3 fallback is essentially Gnome 2.x all over again, so I'm pretty happy with the results. Otherwise I haven't run into any problems so far...
rplnt 14y ago
Setting something on gnome (which Unity is based from)? Let's not be naive :)
- levesque 14y ago
  Yes, poor Unity developpers. They wanted to make this configurable, but Gnome prevented them from doing it. Edit: </sarcasm>
  - bratsche 14y ago
    Gnome did no such thing. Unity is developed entirely by Canonical, they own full copyright on it and they employ all the developers for it. They can add any options they want, and they can omit any options they want. Gnome doesn't even factor into this.
    - rplnt 14y ago
      Yeah, it's probably a choice. Both in Gnome and in Unity. Let's not confuse users by too many options and make our phone support as efficient as possible. Or something like that. I might not like that but there are valid reasons to have dumbed down options. And if I'm not mistaken you can get some configurability out of 3rd party tools.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Is Unity proprietary software? If it was open source I'm surprised it has not been forked by now.
      - sciurus 14y ago
        Disclaimer: My knowledge may be out of date. People have tried to package Unity for other distributions, but those efforts have failed. One of the main problems was the patches that Canonical applies to GNOME libraries (to make Unity work) and to applications (to make them integrate with Unity). If someone wanted to fork Unity they'd have to find a way to handle this to get it fully working on any distribution besides Ubuntu.
sgentle 14y ago
Yes. I am generally supportive of Unity but this is one thing I just can't understand. I get the rationale for avoiding a bottom dock on a widescreen monitor, but the left-hand side doesn't even make sense (browser back button is on the left, window close button is on the left - any time I try to use either of them I accidentally trigger the launcher). The best solution I found was to use ccsm and change the hotkey to anything other than "left screen edge" or something similar. The launcher then auto-hides permanently, but you can still cause it to appear with the windows key. Disappointing, really - there's no clever artistic or design reason to disallow a right-hand dock. It just seems like a case of hubris and ignorance.
- lloeki 14y ago
  > I get the rationale for avoiding a bottom dock on a widescreen monitor Depends. I have set my OSX dock to autohide at the bottom, and I'm glad I don't have to move across to reach it. Flick down, boom, Dock. It works even better than it sounds since it works along the edge, not solely where the dock is. Even with multiple monitors, my dock is at most one screen-wide away (even in a triple head setup), while a left-bound dock is two (even three) screenful away. Also, I seem to unconsciously end up with the pointer in a vertically centered zone. Horizontally it comparatively could stay in any place, left, center or right. Statistically that might be the case too since going up for a (application or status icon) menu will later have me bring the pointer down since I click on a menu entry. What's more it seems more natural and producing less strain for my eyes to peek up or down than to the far left. Indeed when I want for something to 'disappear' (like the pointer when typing) I move it sideways, never up or down. Hence since I'm at most a screen width and half a screen height away form the dock, 'flick, boom, Dock' works only at the bottom. While all of this may apply only to me (and I used a left-bound dock for a while myself, but ended up reverting back to the bottom edge) I understand that some may have other habits and prefer a left-, or right-bound dock. This is why both Gnome 3 and Unity drive me insane, because even if I had a lengthy experiment with a side dock it just doesn't make sense to me, and this is really infuriating to not let people have their way in this case. (besides, vaguely related to the subject and multi head setups notwithstanding, I find it infuriating in Gnome 3 that the left edge does not reveal the dock and the right edge the workspace switcher. the whole thing just begs for it)
muyuu 14y ago
This is why I went to Mint then back to Debian. Still, having to deal with terribly buggy ATI/AMD proprietary drivers, because I need openCL. If you can avoid ATI you shall be fine in Debian land.
- fuscata 14y ago
  I used to feel the same way, since finding in c. 2006 that using an ATI card with Linux was pretty much impossible. However, this all changed when I built a new machine last year, and wanted 3 monitors. Two monitors worked great with Nvidia; 3 was impossible. I've found that, although still a little buggy, 3 monitors w/ Ubuntu, ATI/AMD graphics card and "EyeFinity" works great (on KDE at least): http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Precise_Installation_Guide http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Precise_Installation... Note that you must use a single graphics card for this, which therefore must support 3 monitors. And in response to the grandparent -- I had the same issues with the order of monitors. Luckily they were all identical, so I just swapped the plugs.
  - muyuu 14y ago
    I run 2 high-end ATI/AMD cards (scientific compuptations in openCL). It continues to be hell. Surely, their drivers work fine in some configurations, but sometimes you cannot afford to change your setup to accomodate their buggy drivers.
  - javanix 14y ago
    If you use two different cards and some playing around with X.org you can get the nVidia drivers to play nice with 3 monitors. Granted, it might be the most difficult configuration I've ever tried to figure out on *nix and I'm not trying to shoot you down, but for anyone reading your comment it's not actually "impossible".
heywire 14y ago
Be happy that you can get that far. My Dell Vostro V13 crashes as soon as I uncheck the "mirror displays" checkbox. Some light research pointed me to a known bug for this which didn't make it into this release.
- niels_olson 14y ago
  question: why did you go with the Vostro? Dell seems to be intent on gutting their ubuntu product line. I can't get Ubuntu with an i5 or i7 processor, a solid state drive, or pretty much anything one might actually want.
akavlie 14y ago
I ran into this when Unity first debuted. That's when I knew it wasn't ready for prime time. It's sad that this is still a limitation, but not entirely surprising. Canonical seemed to be intent on pushing this to everyone regardless. And now they don't even seem to be supporting the traditional Gnome desktop (whether 2.X or 3.X).
heretohelp 14y ago
Use Xmonad! :D
revorad 14y ago
Ok, here's a simple workaround for now. It doesn't let you put the launcher on the right, but it lets you keep the launcher only on one window (the laptop in your case). Go to System Settings > Displays. The "Launcher placement" is set to "All displays" by default. Change it to "Laptop" (or whatever screen's on the left). Hope that helps.

revorad 14y ago

What machine (and config) are you using?

cryptolect 14y ago
Lenovo X220. Standard Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity. Laptop display configured for left, 22" configured for right. Because I have launcher configured for auto-hide, every time that I scroll across to the left to reach the laptop display, the launcher gets in the way, hence I want it on the right. I've read some of the other comments below and I've decided to try gnome-classic instead. It's a pity, because I really wanted to fall back in love with Ubuntu. I can't believe they didn't make it configurable to switch which side a bloody launcher is on. Sure, have your defaults, but make them configurable.
- akavlie 14y ago
  I'm curious: how long have you been running Ubuntu on your X220? And how stable has it been? I was using Ubuntu on an X220 as my development machine for a while, with Ubuntu 11.04. It was extremely unstable -- the machine would freeze frequently when unplugging the DisplayPort cable, or even right in the middle of working. That along with a host of small bugs and annoyances (invisible desktop space on the smaller display in dual-display mode -- a longstanding issue in X apparently) eventually drove me back to using a Mac.
  - fingerprinter 14y ago
    X220 here. I had some problems with the trackpad in 11.10 (I use the nub, mostly). 12.04 has been nothing but rock solid the entire way. Everything including the above that you said is a problem. Sorry that I can't commiserate, but basically, the X220 + 12.04 are the near perfect setup I've wished for quite some time* *only thing I would like is a higher resolution screen on the X220.
    - cryptolect 14y ago
      I agree on the higher res desire. It looks so great out of the box you just wish you had a little more screen real estate to work with...
  - cryptolect 14y ago
    Until a few days ago I was running Fedora 16 (KDE) on the X220 and it ran perfectly. Ubuntu 11.04 was why I moved to Fedora in the first place. On the X220, 12.04 has run perfectly. On the X120e however, which also ran Fedora 16 (KDE) previously, I have to admit that 12.04 was sluggish. I haven't narrowed down the problem - but I feel it might have something to do with graphics performance -- which feels strange, since I always historically associated KDE with sluggish performance due to graphics, not Gnome.
  - AncientPC 14y ago
    Hooray X220 owners! I ditched 11.04 for Arch, running Gnome 3 in fallback mode with Xmonad. Gnome 3 fallback is essentially Gnome 2.x all over again, so I'm pretty happy with the results. Otherwise I haven't run into any problems so far...

rplnt 14y ago

Setting something on gnome (which Unity is based from)? Let's not be naive :)

levesque 14y ago
Yes, poor Unity developpers. They wanted to make this configurable, but Gnome prevented them from doing it. Edit: </sarcasm>
- bratsche 14y ago
  Gnome did no such thing. Unity is developed entirely by Canonical, they own full copyright on it and they employ all the developers for it. They can add any options they want, and they can omit any options they want. Gnome doesn't even factor into this.
  - rplnt 14y ago
    Yeah, it's probably a choice. Both in Gnome and in Unity. Let's not confuse users by too many options and make our phone support as efficient as possible. Or something like that. I might not like that but there are valid reasons to have dumbed down options. And if I'm not mistaken you can get some configurability out of 3rd party tools.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Is Unity proprietary software? If it was open source I'm surprised it has not been forked by now.
    - sciurus 14y ago
      Disclaimer: My knowledge may be out of date. People have tried to package Unity for other distributions, but those efforts have failed. One of the main problems was the patches that Canonical applies to GNOME libraries (to make Unity work) and to applications (to make them integrate with Unity). If someone wanted to fork Unity they'd have to find a way to handle this to get it fully working on any distribution besides Ubuntu.

sgentle 14y ago

Yes. I am generally supportive of Unity but this is one thing I just can't understand. I get the rationale for avoiding a bottom dock on a widescreen monitor, but the left-hand side doesn't even make sense (browser back button is on the left, window close button is on the left - any time I try to use either of them I accidentally trigger the launcher). The best solution I found was to use ccsm and change the hotkey to anything other than "left screen edge" or something similar. The launcher then auto-hides permanently, but you can still cause it to appear with the windows key. Disappointing, really - there's no clever artistic or design reason to disallow a right-hand dock. It just seems like a case of hubris and ignorance.

lloeki 14y ago
> I get the rationale for avoiding a bottom dock on a widescreen monitor Depends. I have set my OSX dock to autohide at the bottom, and I'm glad I don't have to move across to reach it. Flick down, boom, Dock. It works even better than it sounds since it works along the edge, not solely where the dock is. Even with multiple monitors, my dock is at most one screen-wide away (even in a triple head setup), while a left-bound dock is two (even three) screenful away. Also, I seem to unconsciously end up with the pointer in a vertically centered zone. Horizontally it comparatively could stay in any place, left, center or right. Statistically that might be the case too since going up for a (application or status icon) menu will later have me bring the pointer down since I click on a menu entry. What's more it seems more natural and producing less strain for my eyes to peek up or down than to the far left. Indeed when I want for something to 'disappear' (like the pointer when typing) I move it sideways, never up or down. Hence since I'm at most a screen width and half a screen height away form the dock, 'flick, boom, Dock' works only at the bottom. While all of this may apply only to me (and I used a left-bound dock for a while myself, but ended up reverting back to the bottom edge) I understand that some may have other habits and prefer a left-, or right-bound dock. This is why both Gnome 3 and Unity drive me insane, because even if I had a lengthy experiment with a side dock it just doesn't make sense to me, and this is really infuriating to not let people have their way in this case. (besides, vaguely related to the subject and multi head setups notwithstanding, I find it infuriating in Gnome 3 that the left edge does not reveal the dock and the right edge the workspace switcher. the whole thing just begs for it)

muyuu 14y ago

This is why I went to Mint then back to Debian. Still, having to deal with terribly buggy ATI/AMD proprietary drivers, because I need openCL. If you can avoid ATI you shall be fine in Debian land.

fuscata 14y ago
I used to feel the same way, since finding in c. 2006 that using an ATI card with Linux was pretty much impossible. However, this all changed when I built a new machine last year, and wanted 3 monitors. Two monitors worked great with Nvidia; 3 was impossible. I've found that, although still a little buggy, 3 monitors w/ Ubuntu, ATI/AMD graphics card and "EyeFinity" works great (on KDE at least): http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Precise_Installation_Guide http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Precise_Installation... Note that you must use a single graphics card for this, which therefore must support 3 monitors. And in response to the grandparent -- I had the same issues with the order of monitors. Luckily they were all identical, so I just swapped the plugs.
- muyuu 14y ago
  I run 2 high-end ATI/AMD cards (scientific compuptations in openCL). It continues to be hell. Surely, their drivers work fine in some configurations, but sometimes you cannot afford to change your setup to accomodate their buggy drivers.
- javanix 14y ago
  If you use two different cards and some playing around with X.org you can get the nVidia drivers to play nice with 3 monitors. Granted, it might be the most difficult configuration I've ever tried to figure out on *nix and I'm not trying to shoot you down, but for anyone reading your comment it's not actually "impossible".

heywire 14y ago

Be happy that you can get that far. My Dell Vostro V13 crashes as soon as I uncheck the "mirror displays" checkbox. Some light research pointed me to a known bug for this which didn't make it into this release.

niels_olson 14y ago
question: why did you go with the Vostro? Dell seems to be intent on gutting their ubuntu product line. I can't get Ubuntu with an i5 or i7 processor, a solid state drive, or pretty much anything one might actually want.

akavlie 14y ago

I ran into this when Unity first debuted. That's when I knew it wasn't ready for prime time. It's sad that this is still a limitation, but not entirely surprising. Canonical seemed to be intent on pushing this to everyone regardless. And now they don't even seem to be supporting the traditional Gnome desktop (whether 2.X or 3.X).

heretohelp 14y ago

Use Xmonad! :D

revorad 14y ago

Ok, here's a simple workaround for now. It doesn't let you put the launcher on the right, but it lets you keep the launcher only on one window (the laptop in your case). Go to System Settings > Displays. The "Launcher placement" is set to "All displays" by default. Change it to "Laptop" (or whatever screen's on the left). Hope that helps.