Re: Identifying monitors

[Norbert de Jonge <mail norbertdejonge nl>]

> I save preferences per monitor

I think giving us more context might be useful. What kind of things do
you save per monitor, and why? These are not things you could recreate
by scaling and positioning based on detected monitor dimensions?

If we're assuming monitors can be arbitrarily plugged in and out, and
detection is unreliable or users may even have unidentifiable monitors,
no function will ever help you. If this is not a cross-platform
application and you _really_ need to recognize monitors, your program
could make a system call to "xrandr --prop" and compare EDID strings.

If you save a collection of settings per monitor, maybe your application
should a) by default, assume the setup is unchanged, and b) allow users
to specify which collection of settings should be attached to which
monitor (location) if they decide to modify their setup.

If you have a broad range of users, all GTK+ 3.22 and newer functions,
including both gdk_monitor_get_model() and gdk_display_get_monitor(),
may be problematic. My reasoning is that Ubuntu Xenial (and thus Mint
Sarah, Mint Serena, and various others) provides 3.18.9 to users:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=libgtk-3-dev&searchon=names&suite=xenial&section=all
All these users would need to manually compile GTK+ 3.22 or newer,
including all the dependencies it needs.

If we know what is the application's intended behavior that is causing
you explore saving settings per monitor, we may be able to offer
alternative solutions.

Best regards,
Norbert