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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why the screens sometimes swap around. It makes no sense to me that sometimes when I log in, my extra screens are switched and I have to move all the contents. The machine has the serial numbers of the screens, and it knows what ports they are connected to. Why can they not just use that information to remember where stuff is supposed to be?

The other thing that annoys me is that it changes the background when I've already chosen just to have black as my background on all screen. Works for a few days, then next time I log in, there's a photo instead. Why, Apple?

They also don't let you use the native resolution of the screens very easily. I had to install BetterDisplay to get this working, and even that isn't great.

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There was an article here on hn like a week ago.

Apparently a lot of manufacturers ship monitors with identical serial numbers, so the os can’t identify them.

This is indeed the main problem. If you have two screens of the same model, the OS is unable to see which is which. This also goes for many USB devices (such as webcams that randomly swap).

Ok but then it could at least say "there is a screen plugged into port 1, and the same serial in port 2, so I'll draw the things that were on port 1 there again"?

That way it would be up to the user to plug the same screen into the same port, which I think I could handle.

Plus I can see the serials are actually different, so just going by serials should work.

Or it should just tell you "hey buddy, you've got two screens with the same serial and that's why I don't know what to do"

Agreed. In my case with a 15" MBP M1 Max and two LG UltraFine 5K's, which I always plug in the same ports, 99% of the time it remembers which display is which correctly. On my 2018 Intel, this was hit and miss. It's obviously not a trivial problem to solve...

>Ok but then it could at least say "there is a screen plugged into port 1, and the same serial in port 2, so I'll draw the things that were on port 1 there again"?

Yes, this is the strange thing. It's not like it's guessing which monitor is which, it's always swapped.

Well, BetterDisplay manages that just fine: https://cloud.paul.garden/s/eipiTJpKESPHZ6Q

Yeah, third party software will do that, Apple will probably just shrug and say, "it works with Apple displays".

Just like the touchpad and mouse 'scroll direction' setting being tied together. It makes sense for Apple mice/external trackpad (which all have a touch surface), so sod the 100% of other far more prevalent mice that use a scroll wheel, for which 'natural scroll' is absurdly unnatural (but disable it, and lose it on the built-in trackpad too).

> scroll wheel, for which 'natural scroll' is absurdly unnatural

IMO there is no objective reason why turning a plastic wheel towards or away from the screen should be the natural choice for scrolling down a webpage. It's just something that some people are used to.

My head sees scrolling on a touchpad, the Magic Mouse and a wheeled mouse as the same thing — and I even set my Windows gaming machine so that the mouse scrolls "naturally" like my Mac.

Fair enough, but it is a different interface to touch, and it even has a separate (duplicated) home in settings. There's no good reason for it to be the same toggle.

(To me, the scroll wheel is reflecting the scroll bar on-screen, so I'm pushing it up or pulling it down. A touch area more naturally resembles the rest of the page/window, so I'm on board with 'natural scroll' - I'm pushing the page up or pulling it down.)

>IMO there is no objective reason why turning a plastic wheel towards or away from the screen should be the natural choice for scrolling down a webpage. It's just something that some people are used to.

Hard disagree. I move the mousewheel down to go down the page, and up to go up. That's natural.

Swiping around my desktop screens and apps like it's a tablet makes no sense. It's the very first thing I turn off on all Macs.

When I’m reading a piece of paper lying on the table and I need to focus on something at the bottom, I physically push the paper away from me, I don’t scoot backwards with the chair. Not saying that your preferences are wrong, I just firmly believe that “going down the page” itself is something that only happens on a computer screen and has no natural physical equivalent where moving something towards your body would make sense.

You pull the mouse body towards you to move the cursor down the screen, you pull the wheel towards you to go down the page.

The idea that you are touching the document and directly manipulating it and pushing the document up is a touch interaction model. Mouse interaction moves the cursor/view. It’s not “natural” but it’s in accordance with decades of mouse behaviour that “toward your body” is down.

Speaking of, “page down” acts like moving the page up. Mouse wheel down (towards you) matches page down, which is agreeable.

UnnaturalScrollWheels is an actual name of an actual tool that I use to fix this particular idiocy.

In my case in does that with the (left) external monitor and the (right) MacBook one, while the central one (another external monitor) is fine...

Check this [1] HN post from 10 days ago, the first problem listed, "Dual monitors swapped positions" and the cause ("The problem comes from vendors who flash the same exact firmware with the same EDID to multiple monitors in the same batch.") :D

[1] Weird monitor bugs people sent me in the last 5 years (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40038759

I have two monitors plugged into some generic docking station, and I keep the lid open below those.

Found this from a post here on HN a few weeks ago, but apparently manufacturers of monitors don't bother to give the monitors unique machine ids, except in batches. Since everyone's two monitors are almost always from the same batch, they can't be told apart on a hardware level. I thought I had struck paydirt in that HN post (a tool that helped with this), but since the two monitors of mine aren't plugged directly into the Mac, the tool can't fix it for me. It would have to somehow work on the level of the docking station. If I didn't have bad luck, wouldn't have any at all?

But it's so much worse than you describe. In theory, I should be able to hit F3, see the little "desktops" at the top, and drag the one from the left monitor over to the right, and then vice versa. But somehow, there's always one virtual desktop that can't be dragged in this manner, and it's always the one with the applications.

> I don't get why the screens sometimes swap around.

Windows had this problem for AGES if you had 1 or more DisplayPort monitors connected, and I think it was in 2020 that they finally fixed it. I used to use this utility [0] to remember my layout, then when I learned that the problem was DP I started making sure I had enough HDMI/DVI ports on my graphics card(s) to avoid DP altogether.

Now I keep it running anyway because it's incredibly convenient in case I accidentally minimize all my windows and then reopen one or something.

Maybe something similar exists for Mac?

[0] https://github.com/lapo-luchini/WindowsLayoutSnapshot

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