xfce4-display-manager auto turns off displays when cable disconnected

Submitted by use..@..r.link

Assigned to Jérôme Guelfucci

Description

tl;dr: display-settings have no memory that a display should stay on whenever it is connected and are now off by default when they are discovered.

After the latest upgrade, it seems the display manager settings have got too clever for me.

I have a screen connected to both the HDMI and VDI outputs (i have my reasons, but I'd usually keep the VDI off while using xfce)

Before, when I unplugged the HDMI port from the screen and plug it to a different device (a projector), the display was turned-on on replug, and it was easily picked by whatever I connected it too.

Now, unplugging an output means it automatically gets turned off. Replugging it requires reactivating the output and mirroring mode in the display-settings (or in the dialog that comes up), which means I need to make sure the VDI output is active, so this stuff can be displayed somewhere.

Before I just freely connected/disconnected the HDMI cable and things worked because it remembered that HDMI output was supposed to be active whenever it was plugged. Now it falls into the assumption that new displays are off by default and has no memory of what the settings were for the previous, so the user must decide on every occasion.

Also, if only one display is active, and the cable from it is disconnected, bad luck, no displays active anymore, regardless of whether the cable is reconnected. This makes sense for laptops where there is always a display that cannot be unplugged, but for every other setup is painful.

Any ways to get back to the original behaviours, or workaround this?

Version: 4.12.0