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Comment by datascienced | Hacker News Reader

Weird that the physical port number is not part of that unique id used to “hash” the monitor. It is like me not being able to figure out how to leave my kitchen for the lounge because the carpenter installed the same make, model and serial number door on all the frames.

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It's not that you can't go to the lounge, you just have a 50/50 chance when you pass through a doorway that it will be the lounge :P

Inscribing identical numbers on a pair of doors will, obviously, not have that effect.

Why would we care if monitors have identical serial numbers?

As the article says (“After standby or restart, the monitors get swapped by the OS, so moving the cursor to the left monitor will actually appear on the right monitor, and vice-versa.”) you might have told your computer that one of them shows the left half of your desktop and the other the tight half.

Now, when your system wakes up from sleep, how does it know which one is which? The workaround is to use the port they’re attached to, but that isn’t always might even both be attached to the same port.

It might from your perspective. If you work in an office where everything looks the same except for the numbers above the doors that would be the situation.

I'm not being facetious, that's the monitor issue precisely (while also being completely not).

Because unlike rooms and doors, you can switch what port a monitor is connected to.

It does if you give directions to the lounge by saying go through door marked XYZ.

Would this software actually have access to that information? I can imagine it would be protected by the OS because on paper, it shouldn't matter what port a device is connected to.

Second, as a user you shouldn't need to make the distinction; yeet a screen into any port and I'd expect it to know what screen it is and what settings to apply to it. There's also the case of using a multiport adapter, or a chain of them if you're sadistic.

The operating system should be the one using that information in the first place—if you see two identical monitors connected, shouldn't you try and identify them based on the only discriminating factor you have?

Do you mean the port number on your PC?

To me, it is a feature, and not a lazy implementation. Now I don't have to keep track of which HDMI port I plugged which monitor into.

Yes, the port number should only be used for disambiguation if both monitors have the same ID.

That would seem best since the port numbers only change when you move. If you move your laptop a lot a docking station might help ease the pain so you don’t need to figure out what way to reconnect. If you move your entire setup a lot the inconvenience of switching monitors is probably a rounding error!

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