Saturday, December 24th, 2005, 4:47 pm
Virtual Desktops & Dual-Head
Filed under: For the past few years, I have chosen to discard virtual desktops altogether. A dual-head display was more than sufficient for me. However, as time went by, I started to do more and more work from remote computers where there was only a single monitor attached. The graphics/video cards did not support multiple display units either. So, I slowly chose to embrace virtual desktops. I made increased use of virtual desktops, of which I already had four — the default number in most Linux distributions. Beforehand, I only used one virtual desktop (i.e. no advantage was taken) while the ‘minimise’ function took care of the rest.
As the habit developed, I realised that, even with a dual-head display, virtual desktops can increase productivity. And they do. I began to use them everywhere (3 places) and developed a habit of keeping 4 virtual desktop. On a dual-head workstation, this is the equivalent of 8 monitors, giving a virtual resolution of about 5000×2000 pixels.
On desktop 1 I typically have the browser, as well as some more peripheral tools including the file manager and maybe a terminal window. Browsers can be used in full-screen mode, yet this tends to break on a dual-head because sites are not designed to accommodate abnormal screen widths. Moreover, centred content, which is very common among Web sites, gets ‘broken apart’ between monitors. Two browser windows, on the other hand — one on the left and one of the right — seems to work fine. Multiple tabs, as well as multiple browser windows are a marvellous pleasure.
