When i’m working on my 2 screen desk i tend to move plugins to the 2nd screen to keep the edit window “clean”. But when i open up such a project on my laptop with just one screen and click on a plugin in the channelstrip the gui doesn’t show up. When i “open with generic controls” i get the screen (most of the time). Back to the dual-screen and clicking on the plugin it opens up perfectly … on the 2nd screen.
So it seems that there is an issue with getting the actual screen setup and moving everything in that range.
It doesn’t help closing the plugins because they get opened up on the spot where they were moved last.
On Linux this is considered the domain of the window manager.
Windows though obviously there is only one window manager, and it doesn’t do great on this (Not just Ardour suffers from this). You can try once you open a plugin GUI to do WIN+← or WIN+→ (Depending on which way it needs to move) which should move one window at a time to another screen. So obviously do this immediately after you double click to open the plugin gui so that it hopefully has focus when you do this. Not sure if it works or not, so report back if it works for you or not!
My guess would be this is likely due to the plugin (or Ardour) remembering the plugin’s X and Y co-ordinates and not realising that your laptop’s screen has a smaller resolution than the dual-screen setup.
In fact having 2 screens is probably irrelevant. The same thing would happen with a single screen setup if the screens were different resolutions
