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Comment by olyjohn | Hacker News Reader

I also have a Plugable TB3 dock. I don't know if it's the dock, or the laptop... but MacOS won't remember my monitor layout at all. Even if the computer just goes to sleep, it wakes up and forgets my monitor layout. Gotta fix it multiple times a day sometimes. Sometimes one of the monitors doesn't show up at all, and I gotta unplug and plug it back in. Sometimes doing that, the computer will actually get the proper monitor layout on like the 4th try.

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Also have the Pluggable tb3 dock and use 2 external monitors via it (+ another separate monitor).

What you described sometimes happens to me too, but definitely not multiple times a day.

If you don’t have it yet, I recommend purchasing SwitchResX software, as Apple’s own display management tool is garbage. What you can do is create custom “Display Sets” which are arrangements of monitors and custom settings/resolutions which you can then turn on/off. Ocassionaly a monitor will disappear, but then doing a “Detect Displays” in SwitchResX usually fixes it for me. That software has largely made a lot of my monitor issues like saving layouts go away.

Interesting. I have no issues like that. I've even changed jobs, so I'm actually on my second Macbook with this hub, and my Mac remembers window positions and monitor layouts every time (knocking on wood so I don't jinx myself). I rarely power all the way down, so usually it's usually just sleep mode for me. I am using the USB-C connection for the monitor if that makes a difference.

I used to have this problem with my Plugable dock and managed to permanently fix it by changing the orientation of the USB-C cable. The pins are not perfectly symmetric, and some devices don't handle one orientation correctly. You might have luck experimenting with the rotation.

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