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I have two monitors:

------   ------
|VGA-1| |HDMI-1|
------  --------

for some reason VGA-1 defaults to the primary monitor. Now this is what I have tried to fix this:

  1. Go to settings edit and set primary on HDMI-1 to True
  2. This: Fedora primary monitor selection
    Now it seems it did a trick since HDMI-1 is primary according to "xrandr --current". However the panel is still on the left (VGA-1) monitor and I'm not sure that my HDMI-1 is primary at all.

Is this a bug or I'm doing something wrong here?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
38

Right click the panel, go to 'Panel preferences'. You'll have a dropdown for 'Output'. Change this from 'Automatic' to the display you want it to show up on. By default it will be on the left-most monitor.

xfce panel preferences

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5
  • 1
    This works only for panel placement, not for primary display selection. Primary display is the display where were all the windows before the additional display was connected. Commented Oct 30, 2016 at 16:38
  • 1
    For me, windows pop up on whatever display the mouse cursor is on. I forget what controls this though. Commented Apr 12, 2017 at 12:54
  • Popping up is not related to primary/secondary/tertiary display. Commented Apr 12, 2017 at 19:16
  • 1
    In fact this got worse when connecting third monitor (left is for VGA, middle is for notebook screen and right is for DisplayPort - the left/top display always grabs the Panel. Commented Apr 12, 2017 at 19:24
  • 2
    Changing this from Automatic to Primary works for me. In automatic mode it was on the primary screen with 2 screens attached, but when attaching the 3rd screen and changing settings on it, the bar jumped to the new (non-primary) screen. This is not the case when setting to Primary (which was my expected default behavior). Commented Sep 4, 2020 at 15:43
2

As mentioned in the comments to the @phemmer's solution, it only holds for enabling panel. Desktop icons, menu etc. would still be not visible.

To actually fix this, do:

  1. Right-click while in desktop and go to Applications > Settings > Display
  2. Then in Display settings choose the proper monitor and toggle it as a Primary Display as shown in the image below.

Display settings with Primary option toggled

After doing that, all desktop utilities should be visible and configuring panel to be shown in a primary display would work too.

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