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Comment by cbdumas | Hacker News Reader

DisplayLink is a "clever" software workaround to hardware limitations that shouldn't exist anymore and I hope it goes away. When I got stuck with a DisplayLink dock at work it caused no end of audio issues when connecting and disconnecting, the driver had to be restarted all the time, it was a pain

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Even "modern" systems like the Apple M1 and M2 base chips had hardware limits of 1 external monitor, a massive regression from the previous Intel systems.

That was just a blip in the Mac timeline. A year later the M1 Pro came out which supported multiple.

That said, very few people connect multiple external monitors to a laptop

What do you mean? Pretty much everyone at the two places I work at connect 2 monitors to their laptops. Who works using their laptop screen when at their desk?!

Where I work I had to sort of convince everyone that dual 27 inch screens is a really great setup. I think most white collar workers with a laptop get used to the laptop keyboard and trackpad and think its weird to dock it and use a regular keyboard and mouse. That is... until they try it.

...(it's me, i work on my laptop screen at my desk)

Maybe I've had unusual experiences, but every office I've been to has a little laptop stand to put your macbook next to the external display. Unless for some reason you need 3 screens, one external is perfectly fine.

[delayed]

It has worked for me pretty great on linux for years.

The problem it solves is that if you have 3 screens (you can often get 3 gpu ouptus) then you are already OCD enough so you will need 4th screen to even them out.

I used the adapters on Mac (over 12 years ago) and Linux (last 10 years before new machine last year) to support 2 external monitors.

They work well enough (I never pushed them hard but for office work). I remember on Linux having to recompile or update this or that when a software update broke them. It was sort of supported at the time.

I think most usb to hdmi devices were display link chip sets..

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