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shrew

Ah that last point really struck a nerve.

- Open lid

- Lock screen shows

- Screen fades to black as it realises there's an external monitor

- Finally unlock, windows are all bunched up on the internal display

- Everything becomes unresponsive, maybe even another fade to black

- A minute after initially opening the lid, suddenly all the windows pop back into place

I have no idea if this is improved on M1 machines, but it's frustrating enough on my Intel 16" that I've just pushed all the auto-lock timeouts to excessively large durations.

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It's vastly improved on the M1 machines, I shared the same frustrations on the Intel 16".

IME, macOS (Monterey on M1 Pro) handles this better than Windows 10. Everything goes to the right places right away, whereas in Windows you'd have windows all over the place.

Windows 10 also, last time I checked, doesn't understand the concept of DPI properly. No idea if it's been fixed in 11.

That is, if you have for example a 27" 4K monitor next to a 27" 1080p monitor then the 1080p version is treated as though it's 25% of the size and the mouse gets "stuck" in the 4K monitor unless you're within the 50% of the screen that Windows thinks your 1080p monitor is adjacent to. This works sanely in macOS as it rightly treats each monitor as having the same size.

It's even more comical if you have a very high dpi laptop next to a 1080p or 1440p large desktop monitor.

Sort of. In my experience, MacOS cannot reliably handle multiple external monitors.

It is really forgetful and switches the order of them when it wakes seemingly at random.

That's odd; I never had any issues like these. Display ordering is always the same. I have two 27" 4K monitors: one connected directly to MBP's HDMI and the other through a USB-C hub (also HDMI). Connecting both always gives me the correct ordering, and it's instantaneous - it takes longer for the monitors to turn on than for macOS to distribute the windows, so when they're on, everything's in place.

macOS's display handling has been flawless to me.

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