Store the screen layout using serials from the EDIDs. Why it doesn’t do this and “tries” to guess their position somehow is beyond me. I use the OWC TB3 dock with dual Asus PA328qs with the latest firmware. Because of apparently some lame design decisions, in order to run dual external monitors over a single TB3 port, you need the dock, which has one DisplayPort output, then a TB3-> DisplayPort (via USB-C alt mode IIRC) dongle plugged into the dock. This is idiotic, but I wouldn’t mind so much if it actually worked consistently. This is not the case. Half the time, when I go into work and plug in, I get 30hz sync on the monitor plugged into the dock. This is when it works at all, without having to guess if the laptop is actually on, because it’s the rMBP which has no power indicators despite having a useless oled screen across the top of the keyboard. So, plug in, wait 5-30 seconds, nothing, open laptop, nothing, unplug dock, nothing, hold down fingerprint reader (the idiotic power button on the rMBP) until...nothing happens, then wait a random amount of seconds, stab it again, wait another 5-10 seconds for the Apple logo to appear, macOS boots into recovery (reset credentials screen, because it assumed that since I couldn’t log in during a boot that I need to reset my password I guess), restart, wait for disk decryption screen which doesn’t work with my wireless keyboard plugged into the dock, type in that password on the laptop keyboard, wait another few seconds for it to log in, ensure that WiFi is enabled as my normal network connection is via LAN via the dock which isn’t plugged in at this point, log in, wait for everything to start, close lid and pray that I don’t have to repeat this, wait another 5 seconds for it to actually sleep, plug dock in, mash random keys until it wakes up, log in again, rearrange monitor layout as it’s usually swapped L/R, one monitor doesn’t work, or they both don’t work again, fix that by power cycling monitors / dock, then finally maybe do some work if it’s not yet lunch time.
For a ~$6k setup, it’s awful. It’d be awful for $1k. About 10 years ago, I had a Dell D830 running Fedora and later, early versions of Gnome shell. The dock powered the laptop and a mouse, keyboard, external drive, and two monitors. It was a single (albeit proprietary) connector, and the dock was fairly expensive (~$200 IIRC). It worked damn great, nearly every time, even with sleep States in Linux on a laptop 10 years ago.
Why is this suddenly harder than putting a Tesla on Mars? Why don’t we have good real wireless HD displays by now? The current state of affairs with Apple laptops and docking is just sad to me. I’m almost bothered enough by it to switch jobs to go there and work on fixing it.