o1bigtenor via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

> What happens is that I come back to my machine and (usually use on of
> one the cursor movement keys) hit any key to reactivate the displays
> and when things have gone south well EVERY desktop is piled up on the
> one 'desktop’.

If it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one - not that my experience will help (probably).

At work, as part of my penance I have to use Windows.
Depending on the monitor, it may or may not have this problem. Before our office got overhauled for hot design, I had a similar problem - if the system ever put the external display to sleep (which was often, and admin enforced settings), on wake, it would wake up, move everything to the built in display, THEN realise the external display was there agin and enable it. Result - every wind shrunk to fix the laptop display (scaled 50% to make it actually readable), then moved onto the external monitor (even the windows I wanted on the laptop display).

But when I went into the office and used the new monitors they’d installed, problem not present - still using HDMI, same laptop.

So in my case it was simply that the external display wasn’t seen as available immediately after sleep - meaning the system re-organised the desktop for the laptop display, and then re-organised the desktop for two displays. And Wind 10 is utter s***e at this, it really is utter s***e - oh yes, and it even screws up which is the primary display (which has the full taskbar). OS X (Max) is “not bad” - it makes a half decent stab at remembering how things were - so pulling the plug on an external display moved everything to the laptop built-in display, plugging it back in means that most stuff goes back more or less where it was. Annoyingly, Mail doesn’t correctly resize the columns - but compared with Win 10 it’s near perfect.

*Probably* not much help, but I have a suspicion it may be the same problem - displays seen as “not there” for long enough to shove everything onto a different display.

PS - I’m envious - I’d be happy(ish) if I could afford 2off 1920x1200 displays (I have one from work from when covid hit and we were all told to work from home). Those extra 120 rows of pixel make a surprising difference, but two would be nicer for some of the work I do.

Simon