If you’ve ever worked with two or three monitors, you’ve probably encountered the same problem. You organize your workplace exactly as you want. Your editor sits on the main display, documents are open on another monitor, and Slack, Discord, or Terminal is visible on a third. Everything feels organized until you switch to another virtual desktop.
Then the whole workspace changes; your documents disappear, your chat windows disappear, and the terminal you control disappears. Before you start again, you rebuild the perfect slim layout. KDE Plasma 6.7 finally departed from this model. Plasma introduced virtual desktops per display, allowing each monitor to maintain its own set of virtual desktops. Instead of treating each display as one big workspace, Plasma now lets you change each monitor independently!
Why are synchronized desktops annoying?
What happens when every monitor changes together?
Virtual desktops are one of Linux’s oldest productivity features, and they serve a very real purpose. Instead of cramming dozens of windows into one desktop, you spread them across multiple workspaces. You can dedicate one desktop to programming, another to browsing the web, and another to email or messaging. Switching between them organizes everything without constantly minimizing and restoring windows.
The system works fine on a single screen. After adding multiple monitors, the experience starts to fall apart.
Almost every desktop environment treats all connected displays as one virtual desktop. Changing jobs means changing each monitor together. It doesn’t matter if you only want the new workspace on your main display, because every screen follows.
This approach does not reflect how most people use multiple monitors.
Your home screen is usually where active work happens. This is where your editor, spreadsheet, or design program lives. Secondary screens play a different role. They store browser tabs, reference material, dashboards, music players, calendars, or communication programs that remain open throughout the day.
These supporting windows don’t need to move every time you change projects. Imagine you are debugging a program and you have one on your central monitor IDE and terminal. Your left monitor shows the API documentation and your right monitor shows Slack and the log viewer.
A new bug report is coming for a completely different project. Ideally, you want a fresh workspace for a new task, with everything intact.
Instead, each monitor changes before you write a single line of code; you are already spending time recovering your workplace.
The break is not one time, but dozens of times every week. Ultimately, many users stop relying on virtual desktops because the inconvenience outweighs the benefits.
Virtual desktops per screen streamline workflow
One monitor changes, while the others remain in place
Virtual desktops per screen solve this problem in the simplest way. Each monitor now has its own independent collection of virtual desktops. When you change the desktop on your primary monitor, only that display changes. Every other monitor stays where it is. The behavior feels so obvious when you first use it that it’s surprising that it isn’t always the case. Let’s say you work on three different projects during the day.
Your central monitor switches between separate desktops for each project. One desktop contains the web application, another contains the backend service, and the third is dedicated to handling pull requests. At the same time, your documents remain open on the left monitor from morning to night. A space appears on the right screen, your terminal continues flow records uninterrupted. No need to reopen or rearrange anything. The desktop simply adapts to the way you already work. Moreover, the benefits extend far beyond software development.
Writers can keep research material visible while switching between different articles. Designers can dedicate one monitor to creative software, while another displays customer feedback or asset libraries. System administrators can leave the dashboard and monitoring tools open when scrolling through maintenance tasks on the main display.
This is the feature that keeps people on Plasma
Desktop environments often compete by offering features that look impressive in screenshots. New animations, redesigned menus, AI assistants, and visual effects are naturally eye-catching because they’re easy to show off. The features that really make your day are usually quieter. Virtual desktops per screen fall into this category. After using them for a few days, you stop thinking about the feature itself because you spend less time adjusting windows and more time focusing on what you want to achieve.
The larger your monitor, the more valuable the feature. Someone with two screens will appreciate this. Someone with three or four monitors may wonder how they manage without one. It’s also an example of what has made KDE Plasma such an attractive desktop environment over the years.
