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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

The distinction between the PC being off and the monitor being off is one that is still lost on people, and it’s understandable. End users should not have to separate these things in their minds. Why would you want one off but the other on, besides use cases that HN commenters will surely list that are only relevant to power users? Just have one fucking power switch.

Apple has largely solved this with their external displays, and the laptop industry has also solved this. Yet the PC world is still full of monitors with separate power switches that just confuse.

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TVs and set top boxes also work this way. I'm still very annoyed that HDMI CEC isn't just standard on all devices nowadays, especially GPUs.

At least you can use i2c directly over displayport. (how I change my monitor's brightness)

> Why would you want one off but the other on, besides use cases that HN commenters will surely list that are only relevant to power users?

I like having my monitor off because of this one weird quirk that OSX seems to have. Specifically, the machine unfailingly wakes itself up from sleep every ~60 minutes to do something, and then puts itself back to sleep shortly thereafter.

When I'm trying to put _myself_ to sleep (and keep myself asleep), I don't want a bright-ass monitor briefly blazing across my room for no good goddamn reason.

Hmmm. That sounds like a bug. That’s not expected behavior and doesn’t happen to me. Are you hdmi or DisplayPort?

It's not uncommon to want to shut off the display independently while a machine works on stuff. It seems with Macs you can learn to invoke that easily in the OS but it's probably not "discoverable" at all.

Meanwhile, displays with indepdent power buttons have been around since decades ago and still tend to work that way with typical TV/media setups. Although that was always unergonomic and we now have semi-reliable HDMI fixes.

> It seems with Macs you can learn to invoke that easily in the OS but it's probably not "discoverable" at all.

Apple menu -> Lock Screen, and the display will shut off after a few minutes of inactivity on the lock screen or by pressing the Escape key.

Locking the screen on my OSX machine

1) Turns off the display in 60 seconds or less. (I think it's more like 10 seconds or less, but I've stopped paying close attention to it, so I am no longer certain about the timing.)

2) Turns the display back on every single time I get a new notification, and turns it back off within a few seconds. Given that this machine is running the Work Messaging Client, that means that the display powers up and down very, very frequently.

So if this is the discoverable "turn off the display" feature that GP was talking about, it's not a fit replacement for the power button on the monitor.

It seems you need Do Not Disturb set to prevent the wakeup. (Moon icon in menu bar, if enabled.)

(replying late for posterity)

I'm on DisplayPort by way of a Thunderbolt 4(? whatever is the USB-C-shaped Thunderbolt) "dock".

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