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Comment by beebeepka | Hacker News Reader

> I have a USB-C dock that provides both power and a Thunderbolt display output over the single cable to the laptop.

That's where I stopped reading. Mac and Windows also have problems with such setups. Not to mention having displays with different resolutions and refresh rates

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> Mac and Windows also have problems with such setups.

Lol no.

I have issues on my Windows laptop when I try to use 2x 4k + one 2k display display from the single thunderbolt connector, due to Dell TB19 dock allocating too much bandwidth for the DP and HDMI ports (while 2 of my screens are USB-C) regardless of the resolution they use or the number of screens connected.

But with just 2x 4k USB-C screen, it provides both power and display output over a single cable, both in Windows 10 and 11.

And if I connect the 3rd screen to the dock after connecting that single cable, everything works.

FYI, since it is a dock bug, the same thing happens in Linux.

> Not to mention having displays with different resolutions and refresh rates

Lol no!!!

My displays are different: the 3rd one connected by DP is an ultra wide CHG49 - so neither the same frequency, aspect ratio or DPI.

Yet it still all works fine. Linux users are weird when they start assuming just because I use Windows, I must have an experience as bad as theirs.

Even my terminal (mintty) is far better than the best Linux has to offer - and I'm not even talking about AHK that lets me control my keys in a language far more advanced what the few configuration xkb or xmodmap offer.

The amount of flickering windows gets away with is astonishing to me, and I say that as someone coming from linux.

Also, what about audio that likes to update in the background and can simply fail until I reboot?

The thing is, OSs are goddamn complex and thus they have plenty of bugs all around.

> The amount of flickering windows gets away with is astonishing to me, and I say that as someone coming from linux.

I have noticed a little flickering on my Lumia 950 that runs Windows 10, but I'm ready to give a pass to 5 years old hardware running an experimental build of ARM64 Windows.

Maybe we have different hardware? I'm mostly using Lenovo laptops with one Microsoft and one Dells tablet.

> Also, what about audio that likes to update in the background and can simply fail until I reboot?

You mean driver updates? It depends on your Windows Update settings.

If you mean the audio getting rerouted, I like that when I plug a new device it gets the audio sink priority without fiddling.

And I like I can control that behavior with AutoHotKey scripts to do precisely what I want if I need to.

> The thing is, OSs are goddamn complex and thus they have plenty of bugs all around.

That is an absolutely fair comment! I'm just surprised linux geeks especially in a specific age group (over 25) seem to believe Windows is evil and anyone using it must not be a techie / must have a horrible experience and would find immediate enlightenment and satisfaction if installing Ubuntu.

All kind of nuance seems to be lost when you explain that it works fine for you, and give practical examples of advanced things that would be extremely complicated and sometimes totally impossible to do in Linux

I use my external display as a USB-C dock. I run it at its native 3840 x 1600 resolution at 120Hz or 144Hz, connected to my MacBook Air 13" running retina native resolution at 60Hz. Never had an issue with this setup on macOS.

My Windows laptop has no problems with this. And neither do the Mac laptops that visitors sometimes bring to the office.

That was my experience with a Macbook-Pro 2019, trying to use 2 2k monitors on it was a nightmare. Sometimes it would work and sometimes I would need to spend a while trying different plugin sequences until it worked again. It was such a problem that I never wanted to take it with me and use it as a laptop and just left it there connected all the time.

This wasn't an issue with older models that had some other means to connect a monitor other than thunderbolt but these newer models only had thunderbolt display and it didn't work properly.

Doesn't that depend on which dock you use?

I believe Caldigit (The one Jeff Geerling uses) is the good one.

this was with and without a dock, had the same issue when I used a dock and when I connected the two monitors into the laptop's thunderbolt ports directly.

>Mac and Windows also have problems with such setups. Not to mention having displays with different resolutions and refresh rates

Sorry, but this is just not correct. I have used multiple monitors with varying resolutions and refresh rates with a Mac for well over twenty years.

It's correct in my experience. My mac refuses to recognize 2 independent monitors in the following setup: laptop -> USB-C -> dock -> 2x 1440p@144hz Displayport monitors. Supposedly this is because Apple doesn't implement the entire Displayport spec, I don't really know the details. My windows laptop handles this particular setup just fine, but forgets one of my displays at work every so often. It's a mess.

> Supposedly this is because Apple doesn't implement the entire Displayport spec, I don't really know the details.

I can see that. I had 2 27" 4K HDR 144Hz monitors that worked fine in Catalina. Big Sur and Monterey, they do not: they'll do 95Hz SDR and 60Hz HDR.

If on my screens I change DisplayPort mode from 1.4 to 1.2, they'll do better (120Hz SDR). So something in Big Sur broke DP 1.4. And Apple doesn't care, because there have been hundreds of bug reports on it ever since the Big Sur betas and it's still broken as of Monterey 12.0.1.

I guess Apple's philosophy is "we don't care if you don't have a Pro Display XDR" (and I say that as someone who owns one).

Correct, Big Sur broke DisplayPort above a certain bandwidth, but only on Intel Macs as I understand it.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252174979?page=1

https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/4k144hz-no-longer-available...

I have to use SwitchResX to define a custom resolution (95Hz), otherwise my gaming monitor won't go above a sad 60Hz.

Meanwhile, Linux runs perfectly on the same setup all the way up to 160Hz. Yet another place where Linux has fundamentally better hardware support than Mac.

Interesting. My M1 Max laptop arrived the other day. I might have to try it.

Even Catalina wouldn't support my displays at 160Hz, only 144Hz.

I currently have that setup for my old work-provided Macbook Pro from 2017. One cable going from the laptop into the thunderbolt dock (no extra cables, as the same cable also charges the laptop). The dock outputs to 2 external displays, one 4k@60hz, another 1080p@60hz. Same 2 monitors are also plugged into my Windows desktop directly.

Been using that setup for almost 2 years, zero issues whatsoever, so I have no idea what you are talking about. I would be willing to concede that I just got lucky with the stability of my setup, but my friends who use similar multi-monitor setups with thunderbolt docks have no such issues either.

I see a lot of people have taken an issue with my statement. Someone with a few accounts has downvoted every single post of mine from yesterday. Fanbois are really something.

It's great that some of you, most people even, don't have these problems with multiple screens on your preferred OS. However, that doesn't mean that no one does.

Think about it. If everyone had these problems, they would have been fixed. Things are not black and white. Not every setup is the same.

Works fine on Windows. One cable to dock, three 4K external monitors (as well as sound, network, all the USB stuff etc.)

This is simply factually incorrect.

The different refresh rate issue was fixed on windows as far as I'm aware a year ago.

> Windows also have problems with such setups.

Not at all. Windows just works.

Not true. For example the Amazon reviews of any displayport KVM will be mostly one star. This is usually because dynamic switching of displayport works so badly on all operating systems.

That’s a problem with the KVM not windows lol.

It's not that simple (and never is). Displayport and Windows are a big part of the problem.

Yet, usbc->display port works fine for my monitor on windows, but doesn’t work in any distro I’ve tried. And using hdmi works but I get flickering if I want to run the monitors in any refresh rate other than 60.

It works as well on Linux as it does using Windows for me, using Intel graphics (both have minor issues with displayport MST, i.e one USBC and two monitors). Are you using NVidia hardware by any chance?

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