"NonDesktop" Proposed For RandR: Useful For VR & Apple Touch Bar Like Devices

[Hi-Angel]

I suppose you can do about the same by connecting a smartphone (e.g. a deprecated one) and running an X11 server on it (or ssh terminal, or telnet), bonus point if that's achieved with USB networking between the phone and PC computer.

e.g. on Firefox OS 1.x you can enable USB tethering whether the phone accesses a network or not. Funnily, you can browse to a web server running on the desktop. So if you have a web server based hardware/system readout thing, it'd work on the phone browser! (as long as you don't use web features that were unavailable in 2014 or 2015. sigh!). Perhaps you can serve a web page with e.g. anyterm and have a lame browser based terminal that runs on phone browsers.



You got a nice answer already but I was thinking instead that "NonDesktop" would be nice to run conky or other things. NonDesktop would be used to prevent silly things - windows getting partially moved into there, the mouse pointer flying into there if you don't want it to, the desktop considering touch bar is your primary display. Albeit if you accidentally declare your real display as NonDesktop you'll have messed it up.

Well, I think if you have enough knowledge and/or curiosity to accidentally assign the property to a real display, you'll also have enough knowledge to switch to TTY and fix things up in some way. So it's okay.

[artivision]

wat

...

Priorities: Modesetting is bad, back to Intel for now. There are other subsystems who need attention first.

[starshipeleven]

I suppose you can do about the same by connecting a smartphone (e.g. a deprecated one) and running an X11 server on it (or ssh terminal, or telnet), bonus point if that's achieved with USB networking between the phone and PC computer.

e.g. on Firefox OS 1.x you can enable USB tethering whether the phone accesses a network or not. Funnily, you can browse to a web server running on the desktop. So if you have a web server based hardware/system readout thing, it'd work on the phone browser! (as long as you don't use web features that were unavailable in 2014 or 2015. sigh!). Perhaps you can serve a web page with e.g. anyterm and have a lame browser based terminal that runs on phone browsers.

Sounds like a whole lot of effort to still get a subpar result.

[starshipeleven]

Well, I think if you have enough knowledge and/or curiosity to accidentally assign the property to a real display, you'll also have enough knowledge to switch to TTY and fix things up in some way. So it's okay.

For the kids following this discussion, that might be wondering about how to "switch to TTY":

Ctrl+Alt+F1 to switch to first virtual terminal number 1 (fullscreen console, no GUI)
Ctrl+Alt+F2 for virtual terminal number 2, and so on and so forth until you reach F6 or F7 as there is where most distros place the GUI.

You might have the GUI at F1 instead, too.

This stuff is great to troubleshoot a linux system when the GUI has locked up, as long as you know how to use command line, and maybe have some basic commandline text editors like nano (because the always-installed vim is not really user-friendly at all).