Meu problema original de "espaço morto" foi corrigido após a reinicialização. Parece que o Metacity recusa qualquer colocação de janela restrita, então eu posso:
- Pare de usar o Metacity ou
- Mantenha uma janela aberta no segundo monitor para incentivar a colocação no monitor principal (eu faço isso de qualquer forma).
Aparentemente, os desenvolvedores do Gnome Metacity acharam que colocar janelas em apenas um monitor é " apenas bobo " (veja a citação abaixo).
A partir do desktop-devel-list do Gnome de alguns anos atrás:
Currently metacity works very very hard to do the right thing in window
placement for xinerama. It works more or less as follows:
1) Try to find a place for the window on the current xinerama
2) Construct a "natural xinerama ordering" which is a breadth-first
traversal of the xinerama graph from the xinerama containing the mouse
point, with preference to left, then right, then up, then down.
3) walk the natural xinerama ordering to find a nearby xinerama with an
empty space that could contain the window
4) if the window is big enough to be maximized, try to find an empty
xinerama where it could go
5) if there is nowhere the window can fit, fall back to a cascade on the
xinerama containing the pointer
I find that this algorithm makes it exceedingly easy to make good use of
all the space available on both screens. A simple "always on current
xinerama" policy would simply encourage users to use only one xinerama,
which is really just silly. If you have two monitors, why not use them?
The one improvement that I'd like to make here is to improve the cascade
algorithm so that it doesn't ever just place window at the upper left
corner of the screen.
-Rob