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Comment by catch23 | Hacker News Reader

Similar experience here as well, but it's eons better than linux on laptops. Just getting linux to support your laptop's video card for multi-monitor displays is a complicated beast already. I would rather deal with crappy package management than deal with driver level problems.

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I used to feel this way as well (except I'm a Windows user), until I read the `man` page for `xrandr`. Wrote a little script to automate everything, and I don't even remember the frustration I had before.

Except that's the very anti-definition of "just works".

It's also totally unnecessary in a DE, where XRandR will be wrapped in a GUI.

It really depends on the laptop. If you are fine with mass market (i.e. likely supported) hardware rather than 2 month old bleeding edge cards you will likely be supported. I'm happily running ubuntu on an Asus VE248H - everything worked out of the box (after the install), including multi monitor support. I'd give up my OSX desktop (powermac) at work for ubuntu in a heartbeat (in fact I have a virtualbox install on it for when I really hit the limits of OSX.)

There are vendors that create dedicated Linux hardware (I got my laptop from System76) and it does work out of the box very well.

With what laptop is this currently true?

I've never personally had this experience, and I haven't heard a sincere account of something as basic as multihead graphics being broken for years.

It's hard to get it to work with optimus-like systems, where the external video ports are not wired to the integrated gpu, and you want to use it by default (which is something you want if you care about battery life at all). Otherwise, yeah it should work out of the box.

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