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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

> Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

I regularly move my work Win 11 Pro laptop between three different multi-monitor (hdmi) setups, and it works flawlessly. I don't recall any problems with Win10 over many years either.

What am I missing out on?

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My last 2 laptops have really struggled with win10/11 multimonitor support. Explorer would often crash, taskbars would not populate, behaviors weren't consistent, taskbars would reset themselves, settings would change randomly after reboots, not including updates resetting all my settings and having no real way to disable updates cuz windows would re-enable them.

did i mention explorer would crash pretty often? like, half the time I plugged in a docking station it would crash explorer. That then reset all the settings. lol just a mess.

Pop OS! is a simple plug and play on any setup i've tried it on, over usb3 or hdmi/dpi. Works great.

Multi-monitor mostly works fine for me in Windows 11, but I do have consistent issues when dragging windows between displays with different dpi scaling. They have the same resolution but the dpi scaling on the laptop display doesn't match that on the two 27" displays next to it.

Adobe Acrobat in particular takes multiple seconds to drag a window from the laptop screen to one of the attached displays when a PDF is open. Now, this is on a 6 year old laptop due to be replaced, but it was fairly high spec when it was purchased (64 GB, RTX 2060, NVMe SSD). It really shouldn't be making me wait on 2d rendering of a document.

My non-corporate desktop has 3 screens, screen#2 is shared with a corporate laptop (via a KVM, but the issues happen without it as well).

If I switch that monitor to the other machine, Windows re-arranges ALL windows to appear on the new "primary" portrait-oriented screen#1, some maximised to fill the screen, some not. They stay there after the other screen is reconnected.

Possibly because the screen being switched is the "primary" screen? At least it's consistent behaviour between both Win10 AND Win11, which is nice.

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