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⇱ KDE Merges Per-Screen Virtual Desktops After 21 Years - Phoronix


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KDE Merges Per-Screen Virtual Desktops After 21 Years

Written by Michael Larabel in KDE on 14 April 2026 at 06:24 AM EDT. 24 Comments
A request made a KDE user all the way back in June 2005 on KDE 3.3.2 is finally resolved. After being sought after for 21 years, the latest KWin code now has support for per-screen virtual desktops.

Back in 2005 the bug report / feature request was filed around having per-screen virtual desktop support since when using a dual screen setup with X11 Xinerama, when switching desktops, both screens switch. As a sign of the times, it was a dual 1280 x 1024 setup.

👁 KDE per-screen virtual desktop bug report


Merged yesterday was a four month old merge request for adding per-output desktops for the virtual desktop manager code.
"VirtualDesktopManager now tracks the current virtual desktop separately for each output. By default it switches the desktop on all outputs together, but there is now an option to enable switching desktops separately for each output."

With that users can now switch virtual desktops independently for each output. Related merge requests to Plasma and KWayland have also all been merged. The merge request contains all the technical details for those interested as well as a demo video.

👁 KDE per-screen virtual desktop implementation


This new per-screen virtual desktop functionality will only work on Wayland and not X11 or XWayland. Look for this per-screen virtual desktop support in KDE Plasma 6.7.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.