XFCE 'Display Settings' Confirmation Woes (Timeout impossibly short)

obobskivich · 07-05-2020, 01:14 AM

I'm trying to change my monitor configuration(s) in XFCE 4 (Xubuntu 20.04) - whenever I enable or disable a monitor, it wants to force one of those 'display settings are changed, you have 10 seconds to click OK or I will revert it because I don't believe you really know what you want' pop-ups. However, none of my monitors can re-sync fast enough, so essentially I cannot change settings because by the time the monitor is re-drawn, guess what? Its reverting!

This happens on both of my XFCE-based desktop systems (which tells me this is not 'a bug' - it's 'a feature') - one of them has an nVidia card, so I can just use the nVidia X Server Settings applet and make changes there (it, graciously, offers a 20-30s timeout), but the other one uses Radeon and thus I am (at least as far as I know) stuck with the XFCE settings (and thus stuck with the monitor configuration it defaulted to, more or less). Short of having to physically unhook monitors when I want to disable/change them, what can I do? Can I defeat this worthless nanny setting? Can I extend the time out infinite or near-infinite time? (Ideally I'd love to 'break' this feature on both machines because it is quite frustrating).

Side note: I'm guessing I could manually edit my xconf and force whatever configuration I want, but then I would have to restart X and/or log in/out and/or reboot everytime I wanted to make what should be a simple change - if Windows and OS X can do this seamlessly, why can't Linux? (and it's really more 'why can't XFCE?' - because this behavior works exactly fine on GNOME and KDE).

Any thoughts?

tinfoil3d · 07-05-2020, 03:04 AM

I can only think of wild hacks like

Code:

kill -STOP `pidof xfce4-display-settings`

from other ssh session a second or so after you click apply or something similar or clicking over x11vnc from other machine but both methods suck.
The better option is to patch it and rebuild(judging from ChangeLog and sources they permanently decided on 10 seconds with no way to change it in configs. So we'd need to change the line below:

Code:

xfce4-settings-4.12.4/dialogs/display-settings/main.c : line containing count = 10

Code:

grep -n 'count = 10' ./dialogs/display-settings/main.c
293:        confirmation_dialog->count = 10;

You can rebuild it manually using this guide:
https://wiki.debian.org/BuildingAPackage
It works for ubuntu too as it's based off the same package management system.

ondoho · 07-05-2020, 07:57 AM

Are you sure the hardcoded 10s cannot be overridden?
I would look in xfconf again. I believe there even exists a graphical editor for it.

If that doesn't help, I'd just write myself a script that does what I want. AFAICS everything can be achieved just as well with some xrandr commands, and it shouldn't corrupt the XFCE desktop if you do it that way.
If the script works you can wrap it in yad or zenity to make it GUI.

tinfoil3d · 07-05-2020, 08:49 AM

@ondoho: I took a very quick look, and that's what I concluded. Also if you just grep 10 seconds you'd find it in ChangeLog dated 2010, they accepted it as a new standard. I looked thru xfconf-query, it wasn't there unlike some other hidden values that usually are.
But xrandr commands can sure be scripted and are another possible solution to the problem.