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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

> 2. This reminds me why I no longer use linux on the desktop

Lest anyone read this and nodded along: This was a defect in the LG monitor the OP worked around, not anything to do with Linux.

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This is mostly true* and beyond irrelevant to the point GP was making (that they no longer use Linux on the desktop because of annoyances like this).

From the original article "It works great on both Mac and Windows, but on Linux it displays just a black panel" and, amusingly, after the fix: "One issue is that now my second monitor isn't displaying anything. When I go into Display Settings, it seems like my computer thinks that both monitors are sending this EDID so it's put the second monitor into the wrong mode."

Seems like 2023 isn't the Year of the Linux Desktop either.

* I say "mostly" because to 99+% of the people, telling them "this monitor works great on both Mac and Windows and shows nothing but a black screen on Linux, but don't worry; it has nothing to do with Linux" will get you some pretty quizzical looks.

If you tell Linux to replace the EDID firmware with a custom binary, without telling it which output to override, I'm not surprised Linux acts the way it does. I can confirm on my machine that overriding EDID for a specific connector works as expected. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/kernel_mode_setting#Forcing... says that you can do it for multiple connectors using commas to separate values, though I have not tried. Though one gotcha is that on my RX 570, `ls -ld /sys/class/drm/*/edid` prints HDMI-A-1 and -2, which is also the name of the display outputs on Wayland, but on X11 xrandr identifies these outputs as HDMI-1 and HDMI-2. (I think you have to use HDMI-A-1 in the kernel command line, but I have not tried.)

Yep, as much as we want hardware and software to be conformant to whatever standards exist, in practice an important part of the job of a production OS is to work around the myriad quirks of hw/sw users will likely encounter. Standards are the input, experience is the output, and users judge on output. Related is yesterday's post about ensuring DOS app compatibility in Win95 [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37311508

Linux contains lots of code to work around a myriad of EDID quirks (and loads of other HW quirks), too:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/dr...

There certainly isn't any big philosophical point to make here, Linux doesn't take a hard stance of expecting correct HW.

Ultimately this is a symptom of (1) bugs happen (here, at LG) and (2) Linux has a lower market share and therefore sees less testing. It's certainly fine to say "then I will use Windows to run into statistically fewer problems", so long as you're aware the same argument applies to any entrenched incumbent. As mentioned earlier, it'd have applied to MSIE in 2005 as well.

> As mentioned earlier, it'd have applied to MSIE in 2005 as well.

What's funny is, I was around in 2005 and had already adopted Firefox well before it was called Firefox. (I was also around for the release of IE 4, and spent half a day downloading it on our 56k modem on release day! Exciting times.)

That's because the web is what I work on, and I am OK taking on buggy/beta stuff in the web domain because I learn useful things.

In the OS space, I was a linux user for a decade before I realized that I was wasting tremendous amounts of time and energy debugging stuff very like this monitor issue, and getting no transferable benefit out of it.

I switched to mac at the time, and have experienced vastly less of this sort of configuration nightmare since.

I love linux and I root for it, and occasionally I still try to switch again, before I end up having to figure out this sort of issue that just empirically doesn't exist on my mac, then I get sad and switch back.

I think that's fine and a respectable choice. I think it's even OK to argue that Windows has a value prop as a paid product because MS spends more effort on HW-specific quirks handling, or arguments along those lines.

Still, I think it does matter what's technically going on and where the fault lies. I also think that just like browser diversity, OS diversity is a net positive for the enforcement of good standards that makes things work better for users overall.

For example, I'm willing to bet (and it's because I know cases of it :-) that many PC peripherals work better on Macs because Linux existing has made HW-manufacturers more standards-conscious than a Windows-only world would have, especially since so many HW/embedded engineers run it.

> I was wasting tremendous amounts of time and energy debugging stuff very like this monitor issue, and getting no transferable benefit out of it

You got me there - in my case it lead to a career of making cars, phones, game consoles and other stuff running Linux, so I guess the over-under on the direct utility shakes out a bit differently here :-)

That said, it's been a very long time since I've done any fiddling/debugging to make any HW work privately. Ironically, I've had a lot more issues making HW work correctly on the M1 Mac I also have, e.g. my (quirky) Bluetooth earbuds work a lot better on PipeWire than macOS ...

Linux* actually does have a tendency towards more hardline stances, simply because it's not answerable to market forces in quite the same way. For example, say 0.5% of monitors out there have dodgy edid values like this. For a commercial OS, that's a lot of unhappy people, many of whom have social media accounts, so "When displaying a new resolution, always start at max(60Hz, lowest available refresh rate) so if something's wrong people can at least see what's going on" might be a good rule of thumb for a commercial OS.

For Linux, however, the equivalent might be "report the bug so an exception can be made for this specific monitor". In other words, it's less important that everybody be immediately happy, as long as bugs can be reported and eventually fixed.

* Shorthand for any OSS kernel and its associated ecosystem

I’ve seen many more monitor compatibility issues under MacOS than Linux, and have plenty of older hardware that works with reverse engineered Linux drivers, but no longer works with Windows.

I think the common case is that vendors test with the current version of Windows, MacOS and/or Linux (in decreasing priority order), then hope that it the hardware is EOL’ed before the drivers bit rot.

This reminds me of a recent complaint about some software which didn't work properly with a certain sync service, and the developer response was that the third-party service was buggy so it wasn't their problem.

Ok, but personally quite a lot of my job involves working around the bugs and quirks of old unmaintained Windows OSes. The customer rightly doesn't care, they just want your software to work. It is almost always possible to at least mitigate the problems of whatever buggy garbage hardware/software you have to deal with.

It would be nice to figure out why Windows and MacOS evidently didn't have the problem. If there's some additional probing that they're doing to catch the monitor out on its lies, Linux could do that too.

Good question indeed.

One thing I could imagine is that Linux is giving preference to using the values in the DisplayID block as it's the newer standard, and since EDID/DisplayID compliance has improved over time the logic may be "the newer one is more likely to be correct". In the meantime perhaps Win/Mac continue to look at the classic EDID data, and if they do, it likely gets less test coverage from manufacturers.

Pure speculation.

Edit: From https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/co...

> Windows does not support DisplayID 1.x blocks, and always ignores them.

No explanation is given.

The LG display sends a DisplayID 1.2 block.

If that's also true of MacOS, that would mean LG made the effort of adding extra data that their tested systems didn't actually use and then got it wrong anyway, which would be funny.

Random anecdote:

I work in the automotive industry, where we often use fancy unusual screen hardware a couple of years before it turns up in home consumer electronics or phones. For example special multi-axis curved stuff, dynamic angular privacy filters, or haptic feedback using electrostatic modulation of resistance instead of vibration motors (that allows you to make the screen feel rough and scaly or glidy, give UI elements a feel-able shape, etc.).

One time, we were told to use earplugs at work for a few days, because of a pre-release firmware bug that could in theory, if other safety mechanisms also failed, cause the haptics to potentially emit an ear-piercing low-frequency tone ...

Temporary EDID bugs, otoh, I've seen so many times. :)

> One time, we were told to use earplugs at work for a few days, because of a pre-release firmware bug that could in theory, if other safety mechanisms also failed, cause the haptics to potentially emit an ear-piercing low-frequency tone ...

Wow, on-demand tinnitus is one hell of a failure mode.

What I imagine is that the engineers assigned to it started off from an EDID from some other display they have, made changes to it, tested on Mac and Windows, never tested on Linux.

That's odd, I was definitely able to add a DisplayID 1.3 extension block (128 extra bytes appended) to a CRT monitor's 128-byte EDID data using CRU, then have Windows 11 see those extra resolutions (when the CRT was plugged into a DP-to-VGA adapter). Though I ended up switching to CTA-861 (HDMI extension blocks) with all the HDMI YCbCr/audio nonsense turned off, because 010Editor and edid2json could understand CTA-861 but not DisplayID (though I learned from this article that git://linuxtv.org/edid-decode.git, or https://git.linuxtv.org/edid-decode.git, has better support for EDID standards than the other tools).

Another oddity is that when I run edid-decode on the DisplayID 1.3 file created by CRU, edid-decode reports the block as "Version: 1.2" instead. Wonder what's up with that.

Mere speculation on my part, since I have no familiarity with the HDMI or DisplayPort protocols:

1. Windows/macOS might have a "quirks table" that hardcodes fixes for spec-violating devices.

2. Windows/macOS might ignore some reported EDID values and derive their own when they determine that the display behaves differently from what is reported (e.g. by recording response packet timings).

> (e.g. by recording response packet timings)

Even modern packetized display interfaces like DisplayPort are still fundamentally a one-way firehose for the pixel data. There's no provision for acknowledging or retransmitting data packets, and forward error correction is optional. The bidirectional sideband channels used for stuff like EDID are not timing-sensitive like the pixel data stream.

It could be the failure mode is identifiable on the OS and Linux didn't add detection and fallback support.

Honestly though it could also be workarounds. Windows is king at making stuff like this work by hard coding overrides. E.g. a custom driver for this display.

A defect that was not in evidence for MacOs or Windows.

Sure, but this is exactly equivalent to saying "This is why I stopped using Firefox for web browsing" in 2005 and sticking to MSIE 4/5 and its take on standards, because the websites always work.

Reasonable and practical, but which direction did get us more progress for the web?

EDID exists for a reason and is a good thing; monitors providing reliable, useful EDID data is something to strive for.

It's gotten a lot better over the years as the result of operating systems using and enforcing it more. Monitors with bogus/garbage EDID used to be a lot more common 10+ years ago.

Basically, they tested it on these 2 and then shipped it. If it would fail on win or osx, LG would not ship it.

At first, this seems a reason not to use Linux, but a future upgrade of win/osx will break your hardware. Tons of hardware gets obsoleted this way. Meanwhile, Linux will just keep on working.

> Basically, they tested it on these 2 and then shipped it. If it would fail on win or osx, LG would not ship it.

Yep. I first and foremost look fir Linux support explicitly called out in the system requirements. If I can't find it, I look for reviews mentioning Linux.

But explicitly supported is always the best, ideally backed by reviews that confirm it.

It's not at all hard to find EDID bugs that affect Windows and macOS, especially where variable refresh rate or HDR or 10-bit color or DSC are involved. And in those situations, working around the monitor bug tends to be just as hard (Windows) or impossible (Mac).

Indeed my Dell is treated with some absurd sharpen filters because EDID says its a TV and macOS wants to "help". IIRC, there was a similar story posted to HN about it, involving debugging EDID and applying an override

I ran into the same problem as TFA in 2017 with an AOC g2460pf monitor. The display port would advertise binary garbage for the EDID that wouldn't checksum, so no OS would try and use it. AOC registered some "drivers" with Windows, so it would automatically download and apply a patch that would make that port usable, but they also included a CD with the stuff on it.

However they patched this on the Windows side was quite fragile, because it kept breaking after OS updates. After I could no longer get it working with the reinstall and pray method, I switched to Linux because of this issue. I fixed it once with an EDID in the initramfs, and haven't had any issues for the last 6 years.

You could try applying the same EDID patch using CRU on Windows, at least if Windows recognizes the monitor in the first place.

Light googling reveals examples of Windows and MacOS users experiencing issues with LG ULTRAGEAR monitors too.

We don't know that though. The fact that it presumably works everywhere except Linux makes me think there's still a bug in that `edid-decode` path.

And as far as I can tell from the article, OP just assumed the display supported 60hz because it happened to show an image when they set it to that.

I don’t think that’s actually correct either. The monitor is advertising Freesync/GSync variable refresh rate. The Ultragear monitors are high end gaming monitors so they come with 48-240Hz VRR on some monitors. That’s the 48-144hz extension in the EDID of this monitor.

Based on debugging some issues I was having in macOS, I discovered from various Reddit and forums that Linux doesn’t handle that well depending on your driver stack/how you connect. If you’re on very modern hardware, kernels, and the OEM drivers it’s a better situation. macOS also has partially broken support for Freesync (or ProMotion as Apple brands it) at the moment on Intel machines.

I have an Asus GSync monitor with 48-144hz compatibility. This works over DisplayPort on my M2 Pro MacBook. On my RX6800 equipped Intel Mac I get 100Hz over DisplayPort 1.4 and 120Hz over HDMI 2.0 due to a DSC bug affecting Intel Macs. Even without that bug, 120Hz sometimes presents the OP’s issues between startup and login so I use 100Hz. The betas for the next macOS apparently fix this.

Either way, it’s a fun patch

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