Rotating left display moves it away from the right display, which silently makes the config not applicable
I grant that in retrospect, this seems like an obvious problem with an obvious fix, but it didn't seem that at the time (note that I've been working all day on other computers and get home like a zombie before fighting with mine)
- You have 2 landscape monitors, adjacent
- You change the right one to portrait
- That works fine!
- You try to change the left one to portrait
- g-c-c leaves it at its original top-left position, but rotated - so now it's not adjacent to the right screen
- You don't notice this at all. Mea culpa? It seems obvious now! But I never even glanced at the preview image.
- You try to apply
- The GUI just says
Changes Cannot be Applied \ This could be due to hardware limitations.
- You get extremely confused about what's wrong with your hardware and waste a lot of time
- Later, you realise
xrandr
can rotate it just fine*
- Finally, you have the (now seemingly obvious) idea to try doing this while the terminal is open - and then see:
(gnome-control-center:18901): display-cc-panel-WARNING **: 20:27:47.378: Config not applicable: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidArgs: Logical monitors not adjecent
[sic]
In other words: g-c-c thus just created a problem where there didn't need to be one, and doesn't report it in any useful/evident way, thus wasting a lot of the user's time, when it could just
- just automatically do the right thing (please: do this, if at all possible)
- or at least hint at what the problem might be (why not propagate the warning?)
Moving the monitors together fixes this and lets me apply - but to not automatically do this, and not even hint at what the problem might be, seems very unhelpful to users (or at least those who are tired to an unhealthy degree).
*
xrandr
is happy to blindly set whatever rotation I want, regardless of location, but it leaves the screens at their original positions, hence with a gap between them.