Temporary resolution changes?

[Luke Benstead]

Hi all,

I recently had a discussion with a Wine developer and I mentioned that
I had on several occasions been left at a low resolution when a
fullscreen application crashes. He said that Wine could perhaps code
in a fix which guaranteed the resolution was reset but he wasn't sure
where this problem lied, or more specifically which project should fix
it, as native games also suffer the same problem.

Incidentally, the previous day I had been in a PC store and started up
SuperTux on a netbook in the shop, I came back a few minutes later to
find the desktop at a low resolution, the game had obviously crashed
(desperate not to give a bad impression of Linux to passers by I reset
the netbook ;) ) so I know it's quite a common issue.

After more discussion with the Wine dev I learned/realized that
Windows generally doesn't suffer a similar problem, because setting
the CDS_FULLSCREEN flag in the DEVMODE structure (passed to
ChangeDisplaySettings) indicates a temporary resolution change. If the
program crashes, or is ALT+TABbed away from, Windows (usually) resets
the resolution back to native.

After some discussion on some forums I found this bug report:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14255

I really just interested to find out from you guys where you think the
problem lies? Is it something that the X.org devs can fix? Or is it
something that should be fixed higher up? Is a "temp flag" perhaps
something that can be passed to xrandr when a resolution is set?

Thanks,

Luke.

P.S. I'm aware that CTRL+ALT+(+/-) or running xrandr from a terminal
can repair the damage after a crash but that's really just a
workaround. I'm sure everyone agrees that ideally no-one should be
dropped to their desktop at a below native resolution.