Comment by tuyiown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuyiown | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the issues of multi display really are only due the OS, my personal experience on multiple platform is that is suck regardless of whatever one thinks the solution would be. There are insolvable constraints implied by multi display:

- Screen going on and off is an asynchronous mechanism that the OS has to treat by an event driven implementation.

- All states must be valid (all graphical stuff must be put on display), as screen can go on and off at any time, for expected and unexpected events

- Those synchronous event must converge to an expected state for the user, whatever the final state is

- App developers mostly ignore those problems giving responsibility to the OS to deal with it. But sometimes they don't, sometimes ignoring the services provided by the OS to would help achieve predictable consensus, invalidating any assumption the OS could make.

- App windows positions state restoration have no definitive logic when there are moved and place across different dispositions, even it's manually by the other or programmatically by the OS.

I just recently had a really weird bug with Linux and external USB-C display. Basically after reboot with lid closed, system was gone into madness, like display flickers, laptop blinks with its led and eventually it just dies (probably kernel panic).

Turned out it's a dance between systemd putting system to sleep because external display is not connected and waking up because external display is connected. I might be wrong about it, but basically display takes some time to initialize and without input it'll turn off, so those events couldn't alight. What's worse it worked sometimes, so I spent some time distro-hopping, because I thought it's a bug in kernel or mesa.

In the end I just disabled sleep mode in systemd. I don't like this solution, but it's Linux, what could I say... At least I was able to disable it, LoL. Probably with Mac I would have to live with it.

This is the biggest pain as a Linux user, using Mac for work.

There's no fixing things. Lord Apple dictates you must use this broken thing, or pay for hacks on the app store

I don't think that the problems should be insurmountable, but I agree that the apple operating systems are not the only (or perhaps even worst) offenders.

What I consider to be absolutely basic - if I am sat at my desk plugged into two other screens and I have a particular screen set up, then I disconnect and go off to a meeting and come back 30 minutes later, I want my set up to return to it's original layout. Bonus points for making the setup while on the move also useable (perhaps converting screens into workspaces or something).

The only time Linux Fedora didn't work, was before I installed the Nvidia drivers.

I can't remember having any multi-display issues on Windows or Linux(after installing Nvidia).

Sound was always an issue for Windows.

I'm on Linux and I don't have any of these issues

Well I have them all the time

Did you try to solve them? "Linux" doesn't really mean anything, which DE/window manager? X11 or Wayland? Which graphics drivers?

Every configuration will have a slightly different solution, but at least there is usually a solution and it makes somewhat sense. And you can customize it to make sense for _you_, not what someone else decides makes sense. Back when I used to work in an office and used to dock/undock my laptop, i3 worked well.

I assigned workspaces 1-5 on my left monitor and 6-10 on my right monitor. When I disconnected from the dock, workspaces 1-10 would appear on my single laptop screen. When I connected it back to the dock, they switched back. I am _pretty_ sure it was all handled by i3 in the config.

I don't doubt you figured out a stable setup. My original comment was just to point out that I don't believe there is a definitive, all purpose, acceptable solution to the multi display problems.

The idea is not that specific combination are not solvable, but for each setup, you will have to solve issues manually or live with inconvenience due to the nature of the problem.

For our specific case, I didn't meant I was annoyed every day with my setup. I just meant I always had to fiddle a little to end up with a workable solution, each time I had more than one screen.

Debian-family?

Don't use outdated/old Linux Distros. I almost always find out someone is using a variant of Conical's Ubuntu CD marketing and it explains why they have some terrible experience.

Updated distros usually have everything working with modern hardware working together with software. Look into Fedora.

Ubuntu/Debian/Mint need to be avoided and we need to warn people.

Where "outdated" means like 1-2 years at maximum. The horror.

If you want to plug "new" at least go for silver blue or nix os, where it makes a difference.

1-2 years is SOOO long

That means no running NVIDIA GPUs for 1-2 years!

Or having broken software for 1-2 years!

Nope. You get the working software from 1-2 years ago. And you get "hardware enablement".

Tiling window manager with rules for window placements. It's not for non-devs, but for me it's perfect.

I’m surprised there isn’t much discussion on the amazing ecosystem of tiling window managers in this whole thread.

When I was still using macOS one to two years ago, I was using yabai [1] and it was perfect

[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

Idk about 'perfect', it's still painful and you wish you were using Linux, but it makes it just about workable.

I’m working with Linux mainly these days, and I think the “pain” for me usually is just getting the initial config right, and learning to live with the quirks on the specific platform.

Of course nothing is truly perfect, but I would say that after the initial learning curve, I had really pleasant and productive time with yabai.

Same. I started using ion3 in like 2002, switched to xmonad a couple years later, then sway for the last four years. Multi-monitor setups pretty much the whole time and it's been smooth.

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