On Tue, 6 Sep 2011 04:02:39 -0400, Brandon Allbery wrote:
>> I don't understand why large desktop is not so much common[...]
>
> Window managers don't do it any more because X11 has had the ability to do
> it itself for some 10 years now (see the "Screen" section in xorg.conf,
> notably the "Viewport" declaration).
If I understand correctly, they're different. X server resolutions are
fixed by the video card, and you can only choose one from them. E.g.
in my case 1280x800, 800x600, etc. And X "viewport" happens if the
_server_ resolution is bigger than the _monitor_ resolution.
While it was originally introduced to allow multiple monitor resolutions to coexist, it was expanded sometime in (IIRC) the XFree86 4.2 days to fully support this more general usage. (There is an additional limitation based on protocol pixel addressability — +/- 32767, IIRC — but I think modern servers have extensions to correct that, and it affected window manager-based implementations as well.)
Large desktop is provided by window managers, and there's no
Large desktops were provided by window managers when the server wasn't capable of providing an arbitrarily sized root window. Its implementation within window managers was a hack for a server shortcoming that has since been fixed.