After filing a bug or two on Launchpad I finally got filled in on why my setup is currently so horribly broken.

The long and short of the matter is this: The old Twinview/Xinerama regime is gone and done away with. They are a thing of the past, a legacy hack that had to be thrown out at some point to make way for the new and shiny xrandr.

The reason is that Xinerama doesn’t allow you to do things any sane operating system should be able to do, like hotplug monitors and projectors. Xrandr does support those things. However, it doesn’t right now support more than than dual-head setups, which is apparently the most prevalent use case out there right now.

Multiple cards and more than two monitors are in the works, and though xrandr can’t handle them right now, it will be able to in the future, perhaps even in Hardy+1.

Bottom line: If your setup includes more than two monitors running off one card, you’re screwed. Stick with 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) until you hear it’s safe to upgrade. So that’s the good/bad news.

For myself, I’m a little less infuriated now that I understand the issue a bit more. I’d urge the Ubuntu developers, though, to disclose these things a little more openly in the future. If there are going to be serious regressions, if something isn’t going to work that worked in the previous version, let me know. It’ll save me the trouble of upgrading and downgrading and a lot of shouting curses at the developers I can name. Plus, not everything is always going to be sunshine and daffodils with every release; of course things are going to change, sometimes taking a step backwards to take two steps forward, but at least let me know before hand. There’s a distinct dearth of information regarding any of the problems I’ve had, at least that I could find.

Should you ever read my frustrated little post and feel I was unfairly slagging you and your xrandr GUI, I assure you I was not. In fact, if you make this thing work for me and my four screens, I will literally give you money. I don’t make a lot, I have a very expensive mouth full of cavities, I’m still paying my and my wife’s debt, and gas costs about a buck a centilitre, but I will give you money. And I will say nice things about you to my friends. And I will distribute Ubuntu CDs to everyone I know. And I will write a song for you, record it on Ardour, and try to get it into the Ubuntu Weekly newsletter.

Just, you know, FYI.