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Comment by routelastresort | Hacker News Reader

... or switch back to Linux, and just download everything you need, without encumbrances like this. I recently switched back on all of my OSX and Windows machine, and it feels great. Only through years of contributions to open source projects, and hanging my head in shame can I ever be redeemed. Oh, and Steam is only going to get better!

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I used Linux as my main OS for 7 years before switching to a mac. I just got fed up with all the hardware compatibility problems and stuff that didn't work without spending hours messing around with library dependencies etc. I'm not going back in a hurry.

I switched to linux and it was great. but one thing keeps bugging me. Every now and then, after and update my nvidia-drivers are lost, I loose my second screen and have to go nuts, while searching for a way to tell my laptop, that there is a secondary screen (that is much bigger and better and makes working with the laptop ok).

So this is the only thing in my experience, that really sucks. The rest (compared to WIN) is really, really great.

How long ago did you switch back, because recently this seems to happen less and less. If you're smart and pick a laptop which has proven linux compatibility it really doesn't happen anymore.

I remember 5 years ago getting speakers to mute on my laptop when I plugged headphones in was impossible but I haven't seen a similar problem in my last few laptops.

I still haven't found a linux distro that doesn't eventually resort to me fudging with xrandr for a week trying to get multiple monitors working correctly. Granted, this was 3 years ago. Have any linux distros solved the problem of configuring multiple monitors using a gui yet?

> Have any linux distros solved the problem of configuring multiple monitors using a gui yet?

For two monitors on one video card, things are pretty okay on Ubuntu and derivatives. More than that, especially 3+ with non-uniform geometries, and you will have fun. If you have multiple video cards, you will have even more fun.

"fun"

I have two nVidia cards in SLI powering 3 monitors.

Setup was pretty simple using the binary nVidia drivers on Kubuntu, 0 config file wrangling.

Now, having those three monitors in non-uniform geometries is something I wouldn't even consider tackling

[EDIT]

Kubuntu 12.04

All monitors in a single X Session and automatic application window sizing works as you would expect in KDE

(i.e. Maximising a window maximises to the current monitor only and being able to drag to right side of one monitor causes the window to use up half of the current monitor)

Can you get them all in the same X session? I've never tried SLI, I generally just upgrade to a beefier main card and use a second card to drive extra monitors. I have an HD6970 and an HD6450 on 4 monitors that work great under OS X (Hackintosh'd) and Windows and things go extremely sideways under Ubuntu.

I had 3 monitors / 2 Nvidia cards working fine in Kubuntu 11.04 and 12.04. All one X session. It was easy. But that was with uniform geometry. (I had 3 identical monitors.) Haven't tried non-uniform.

Ah well, Radeon with Crossfire under Linux is... yea, good luck. All I can say is nvidia in SLi works fine.

Define correctly. Multi-monitors worked just by plugging them in, and I could configure the mode (clone, extend, etc) using a GUI panel.

I did use xrandr to setup the virtual screen so that I could define the exact position of one screen relative to the other, which enabled objects to continue in an horizontal line across monitors.

My understanding is that the driver-makers that cooperate with Xorg and the kernel implement the official multiple-monitor stuff nicely and everything more or less Just Works. Unfortunately, that's pretty much only Intel. nVidia and AMD like to do everything themselves rather than cooperate, and so things like multiple-monitor support can require driver-specific config tools, or messing with config-files to tell the drivers to emulate the standard interfaces so the standard tools will work.

I use two monitors with an nVidia card, and it just works. You can configure stuff through nVidia's GUI application, if you want to.

My personal experience over the last couple of years:

I ran Gentoo for years, and my experience was similar to yours. I could get things to work but it took a lot of frustrating trial and error, and then periodically a version upgrade would break everything and I'd get to start over. About a year and a half ago I finally got sick of it and installed Kubuntu.

Kubuntu 12.04 + 2 monitors + AMD proprietary drivers = you get to choose between accelerated OpenGL and multiple monitor support. You can't have both at the same time. (At least I couldn't, with the video card and driver versions I had 6 months ago. I spent many hours trying, then remembered I have more money than time and bought a $90 Nvidia card.)

Kubuntu 12.04 + 2 monitors + Nvidia proprietary drivers = easy. The GUI worked, first try, no problems. The only goofy thing was that my left monitor showed up on the right side, giving me a choice between physically moving the monitors or changing the default positions in the GUI. I changed the defaults in the GUI.

Also, on my former work machine, Kubuntu 11.04 and 12.04 + 2 Nvidia cards + 3 monitors = easy. (Some cow-orkers had 2 Nvidia cards and 4 monitors, also easy.)

I haven't tried newer versions of Kubuntu on a multi-monitor box, so it's possible (but not likely) they've gone backwards.

> The only goofy thing was that my left monitor showed up on the right side, giving me a choice between physically moving the monitors or changing the default positions in the GUI

You could have switched the cables. Just saying :)

Depends on if both cables were the same type. Possible the monitor ports were different?

Different cable types. One analog, one DVI.

I have 3 monitors over 2 video cards on Fedora 19 - works fine & as one would expect.

I have no problem with using Linux instead of Mac OS X. I would love to in fact, but I have a laptop. One of the greatest features of my laptop is that I can close it up and take it with me. I can then open it up and continue work.

The problem I run into with Linux is that sleep, suspend, and hibernate do not seem to work or work reliably. This is what is holding me back from jumping to Linux for the most part.

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