[ajscherer]

For the past couple years I've been using a multiple monitor taskbar tool called Actual Multiple Monitors (http://www.actualtools.com/multiplemonitors/) which I think is superior to the tools he recommends (at least it was at the time I tried the others). It allows you to have a fully functional taskbar on every monitor (start menu, notifications area, aero preview, the whole 9 yards).

After becoming accustomed to this tool, I'm convinced this is the right answer for how an OS should do multiple monitors, and I find Windows 7's out of the box support for multiple monitors offensively bad.

[paol]

All OS's support multiple monitors offensively badly.

The least bad used to be linux with Gnome, which had a bad default configuration but could be quickly configured to work great (without installing additional software even). Of course both Unity and Gnome 3 screwed that up.

Overall I think multiple monitor support isn't on most software developer's radar. Have you seen the full-screen mode in the latest OS X? That's not even bad design, it's absence of design.

[tikhonj]

On KDE 4.7 (or 4.5+, but there's no reason to use older versions) multiple monitors work exactly how I want them to. It's great.

The only issue is that there is no shortcut for moving windows from screen to screen by default; however, you can set it to be whatever you want from the settings so it isn't much of an issue.

And, unlike OS X, KDE actually has a great full screen mode. I've found that having a fullscreen browser (or two side-by-side) on one monitor and a full screen Emacs on the other is my perfect layout.

[paol]

Apologies, when I said "all" I wasn't thinking of KDE which is actually the only major DE I've never used in a multi-monitor setup. From what you say I should probably try it.

[doktrin]

> The least bad used to be linux with Gnome, which had a bad default configuration but could be quickly configured to work great

I had a pretty unpleasant experience getting multiple monitors to work properly with Gnome. It's been so long I couldn't tell you exactly what the issue was, though.

In contrast, multi-monitors 'just work' on both Windows and OSX, so I wouldn't say they support it "offensively badly".

[Cieplak]

> The least bad used to be linux with Gnome

I like to think it still is. I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 with Gnome 2.32 on my personal laptop. I'll switch to Arch when Ubuntu ceases support for 10.04, because Gnome 2 seems much saner than unity or gnome 3, at least for now.

[Macha]

Arch were the first onto gnome3. Gnome2 might be in the AUR, but if you just install gnome on Arch, you're getting Gnome 3 with Gnome Shell.