Autodetection fails if "default" profile is deleted

[rolandu]

Here is what I think happened - and I don't want to try to replicate the behavior:

• started using a new laptop running Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.0
• as it's a laptop, it was frequently connected to different screen setups at home and at work
• initially had occasional problems with screen setups not being detected, so I started to use the autorandr console (not sure if autorandr came installed by default in Mint or whether I installed it
• my initial setup was (and I think this was the mistake): deleted the profile "default" and created new ones for "laptop", "work" and "home"
• had a terrible experience for many months, screens were almost never properly detected, after each connect or disconnect to a screen I ended up with an unusable minimal resolution and had to manually call autorandr <profile> to set my profile, could not find any solution to this
• then I discovered that my startup items contains the item /usr/bin/autorandr -c --default default
• I got an idea: I detached the screen, deleted my "laptop" profile, set it the resolution manually and saved it as "default"; so now I have "default", "work" and "home"
• much better experience now - almost all the time, the correct profile is loaded

I don't fully understand what the startup item does or whether it keeps autorandr running in the background. I am also not sure what the "default" item does. However it seems to me that not having a default profile messes with autorandr's method of detecting the current setup.

Could this be a bug?

[laur89]

then I discovered that my startup items contains the item /usr/bin/autorandr -c --default default

The systemd service installed by debian package also starts the service w/ /usr/bin/autorandr --batch --change --default default

Service started failing for me with the same error quite some time ago. I suspect something changed at one point. What I did was creating a symlink ~/.config/autorandr/default pointing to preferred profile in same dir.