About a year or so ago when I switched to Linux I found out the hard way that it lacks proper 3 monitor support. There was ways to make it work but it required some pretty nasty work arounds such as having a separate X session on one, and by doing that, lot of things would get extremely flaky like random artifacts showing up on the screen, title bars going all black and other messed up things.

There were other options that involved treating 2 monitors as 1, which was a huge issue as things just open all over the place instead of being contained to one physical monitor. Overall the options were not really usable.

Ended up having to use 2 machines, with synergy, but that has it's own issue, such as the cursor being extremely choppy in certain applications, making it unusable. It's very random too, web pages with javascript seem to cause it, so using something like phpmyadmin or even duckduckgo search results causes the cursor to be very hard to move.


Just wondering if there has been any improvements and if I have any chance of revisiting 3 monitor support in a single OS instance? The kicker is, I want the 2nd (middle) machine to be the primary. Even windows has a hard time with that sometimes. Do I have any options to get this to work or should I keep using my syngery solution?

Anyone by chance know how to fix that choppy cursor issue?

TBH I've never tried more than 2 monitors in Linux, but with 4 monitors in Windows I've been very surprised at the inconsistency and instability. Primary monitor randomly switching around, new windows deciding to open on any monitor they please, switching between 1 giant display split between four outputs and 4 individual displays seg faulting the entire OS and causing it to reboot, etc.

For some reason software support for >2 monitors in any OS I've experienced just isn't up to par, and I don't know why.

I hope you get it resolved, since I would REALLY like to expand my current setup into 3-4 monitors, I'm just afraid that I'd never get it to work to my satisfaction.

At work my Linux workstation has four CRTs connected and my Windows 7 workstation has four LCD displays. Both work OK. The Linux system is a much older computer and needed quite a bit of experimentation to get the xorg.conf into a state where things worked well. I'm don't know whether current hardware would need less tweaking.
My first attempt at setting up this Linux system was a dismal failure at support of more than one display. With xinerama, it was so hopelessly slow it was unusable. With other methods of joining displays, performance was OK but I couldn't get the displays to work together nor diagnose what I was doing wrong.
I swapped one obsolete computer for another at work and retried. That used a different closed source Nvidia driver, that had no performance problem with xinerama.

Open source Nvidia drivers entirely failed to support 4 CRTs on either system. One old closed source Nvidia driver worked with xinerama, the even older closed source driver worked with xinerama but hopelessly slow. (Choice of closed source driver is not up to you. It is determined by the display hardware).

On windows, a few openGL based programs break when their windows are on two of the four displays (apparently get confused by the absolute X coordinates) but work fine on the other two. Most programs work fine across all four displays.

Shutting off any one or more of the four displays while windows is up absolutely trashes everything and takes significant effort to get things back, so I simply don't shut them off ever. Linux had issues booting up with CRTs off. But I was expecting that from my previous use of Linux with 2 or more CRTs. It is easy to put the options in xorg.conf to tell Linux to trust xorg.conf regarding what CRTs are there and to ignore the physical reality. Having done that, I can freely turn the CRTs on and off as I choose. I wish Windows had similar means of ignoring the lack of temporarily turned off hardware.

I don't have direct experience with this (dual monitor only), but from what I've read, much of how multi-monitors are handled comes down to the desktop environment concerned, and your best chance of success may come from using NVIDIA cards with multiple outputs (eg Quadro NVS technology).

Hmmm it sounds like it's still a disaster. And yes in Windows it's TERRIBLE too. I work at a NOC, and God forbid if I turn off one of my 4 monitors... everything literally shuffles from one screen to the other and they flash for about 2 minutes then I have to place all my windows back where they were. It's crazy nobody seems to be able to do multi monitors right, not even Microsoft.

I actually had terrible luck with Nvidia and Linux, ended up switching to ATI. Even with single monitor I was constantly getting artifacts, cursor getting stuck in hand mode and tons of other weird bugs that forced me to reboot. All those issues went away when I went ATI.