KDE display management to get a boost with kscreen

Two developers from Red Hat and Blue Systems are collaborating on improving display management in the KDE desktop. Blue Systems developer Àlex Fiestas has developed the libkscreen library that polls connected displays and collects information about their available resolutions and outputs. Meanwhile, Dan Vrátil is being sponsored by Red Hat to develop a user interface for KDE's System Settings that uses the information from libkscreen to let the user configure the displays. The display manager Vrátil is working on is called kscreen, with the GUI being dubbed "KCM" or "KDE Display Configuration".

Work on Vrátil's kscreen is still ongoing, but the developer has already posted screenshots and a preview video of the application. Likewise, libkscreen is not completed, but Fiestas has also posted a video showing how the library can detect screen information via the Extended display identification data (EDID) protocol and will automatically position a new display on the right side of the currently active one. Fiestas and Vrátil explain that in the finished implementation, the KDE desktop will be able to remember displays that the user has already configured, including their positioning relative to each other. In Vrátil's words: "The best part of all this is that users won’t be exposed to the KCM very often, because connecting an already-known monitor will configure it and place it automatically depending on the last configuration."

A demonstration of the current development state of libkscreen

While both parts of the project are still under development, source code for kscreen and libkscreen is available from the KDE project's Git repository. It is currently not known when and indeed if the new display management tools will land in an official release of the KDE Software Collection.

(fab)