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Edit: I'm glad so many of you have had no issues with multiple monitors. My set up is a little unusual (3rd display is an infrequently used large tv hooked through the receiver) and is definitely solveable but will take some effort (and honestly, I'd rather spend my spare time outside or with friends, so who knows when I'll fix it.)
Like a month ago, someone wanted to connect my laptop to a projector in university class to show presentation. Little did I know that after connecting HDMI cable I will have a black screen on my laptop, lol.
If I knew my laptop is going to be used in such way I would prepare, but still...
The trick is to buy linux-approved hardware.
For example, there are specific machines which are approved by ubuntu as officialy working with ubuntu.
Thinkpads are generaly good to use.
Consumer Thinkbooks (Shitbooks) like the 16 G7 IML are NOT at all compatible.
You gotta work your hardware around linux a bit.
Sent this to my normi friends, Iβll keep you up to dateβ¦
Update: they only pointed out that my usage of the expression βamirite?β Is out of date.
lol, getting all displays working is indeed my biggest worry for my last Windows PC, migrating next month. It has both an NVIDIA and a Radeon GPU, and that works great on Windows. But a quick test boot from USB did not go so well on Ubuntu, so the truth will only come out after a real install with drivers.
Social gatherings? Like, with actual people together in one space, talking to each other? I'm not buying it.
My third display is a TV plugged straight into my Nvidia HDMI. It's mounted on the wall above my other two monitors on the desk. I watch Jellyfin on it. I don't watch broadcast, but that's on a different input anyway. I'm wondering what issues you're having. It just works on Mint.
Ahahaha!
Yeah, Mint as well. From my reading it's because I have an additional layer, my tv goes to the stereo receiver and from there links into the computer. Unfortunately, the receiver tells the computer when it's shut off but not when it's turned on or somesuch. So, right now I've "solved" the issue by disabling the auto shut off. But it means the computer always thinks three monitors are on and engaged. Which causes issues as my primary is the desktop monitor etc. Nothing outrageous but one of those tweaks I'd like to make. And unlike Windows, it's a tweak I know I can make.
This was me in 2003.
... And ever since.
[Edit: PS: ... Not the multiple monitors thing though. I guess I got lucky. Nvidia were kind to me.]
I don't know why I love that picture so much.
I literally knew a guy like that in Ireland. I swear I don't even know how I knew him, but I just remember him honing in on me to talk about fucking Linux in the pub every time he'd see me. I didn't even use Linux on my own machine! ;_;
But soon...
I use a rolling release distro (void) and I haven't had to touch my system configuration since I set it up 4 years ago.
I haven't had trouble getting displays working since 2007.
I have problems to this day with a single monitor setup. When I switch the monitor to another input (e.g. to play with my Switch), KDE Plasma, X, or something else freaks out, about half the time (I'm guessing it has something to do with locking or DPMS timers). When I switch back, it is running that the "safe" 640x480 which can't display enough of the display settings panel under system settings for me to restore the 1920x1200 monitor native resolution!
Things are better than 2007, and they might be better than MS Windows, but "no trouble" is inconsistent with my experience.
Look at this guy, running a headless workstation
I have trouble getting real displays working all the time...
Needing to know which serial port is which and manually tellling the kernel via console=ttyS0,115200 or whatehaveyou is annoying....
What other displays could people mean?
That's a job for your bootloader
Well it's not a problem in arm environments generally, just in x86 land, and the bootloaders don't have a good shot of figuring it out on behalf of the kernel either... There is an ACPI table but no one cares about it in Linux land and is almost never used in Windows land (EMS does support it) and as a result most systems don't bother doing it at all.
It's because one of my three is a sporadically used tv that's hooked up through my receiver system. Windows had trouble with it too and in more irritating ways. I just have to sit down and do some work to create a way to easily toggle between 1, 2 and 3 screen layouts/settings etc.
Windows had trouble with it too and in more irritating ways.
Honestly, I'm embarrassed how long it took me as a human being to realize that things don't have to be perfect to be better. I would be way harder on any change than I was with the status quo.
Anyway, yes, especially after having more and more issues with Windows 11 in particular, for me and my use case, Linux is genuinely easier to use day-to-day. Is it perfect? No. Is it better? Yes, no contest.
I have a similar use case with my PC and TV. My PC is across the house from the TV and is connected via an HDMI over Ethernet KVM for when I want to use my PC as a gaming console.
What I ended up doing was creating an automation in Home Assistant to turn on my KVM via a smart plug, then wake-on-lan my PC, and intiate a Steam Big Picture mode gamescope session. This was pretty tedious to get working all together, and startup time is pretty abysmal (around 1 minute to get fully into Steam), but it does actually work consistently.
In case anyone is interested in replicating my setup: I'm running NixOS 25.11 with the Jovian flake installed, and launching my session via the systemd service run_gamescope. If you're not on NixOS, you should still be able to build your own solution by emulating the Steam Deck startup services (honestly, it's not that complicated), or looking into projects like ChimeraOS.
What distro are you guys using to get errors like that? I've been a Debian guy as long as I can remember and was so happy when I gave up using Windows for games. Windows doesn't seem to scale worth a shit, I have two twenty-seven inch monitors and one twenty-four inch monitor flipped portrait (it feels wrong but is so great for documentation); when I move a window halfway between two different size monitors the window is all fucked up, on Debian it is the same physical size across the displays and doesn't look like someone is trying to zoom in on half of it.
All that being said, my son's computer is close (he runs Arch... btw), but not perfect... I don't know if that's an Arch thing or he just doesn't care about it as much as I do.
I'm another data point where displays work under Linux better than Windows, making this particular example amusingly wrong.
This is a Dell precision laptop with a dual usb-c connected docking station. Intel cpu plus a discrete nvidia gpu.
Using Cinnamon in X11 on Linux Mint or LMDE, works great.
Using KDE Plasma in Wayland on Debian? Works great!
Using Windows 10? Bzzzt.
I think I've had Linux DEs occasionally forget my monitor order & rotation just like Windows would, but out of the box Windows wouldn't even use all my monitors.
Same for me. In Linux, I plug in USB-C and both monitors in the chain light up every time without thinking.
For some reason, dual boot into Windows and it always disables one of the two by default until I manually go in and tweak it alive, and then it will do it again next time I plug in.
Now back in the day, futzing with XFree86 config files and CRT monitors and absolutely lots of 'voodoo' to match what Windows pretty simply did with display configuration. But nowadays at least with kwin wayland compositor on nVidia proprietary drivers, it always does exactly what I expect without asking, and Windows is the one that assumes that I don't want to use all the displays that are connected.
Windows seems pretty clunky by comparison nowadays when it comes to display configuration.
Now juggling my bluetooth audio... I think Windows still has the advantage. I have no idea why sometimes my bluetooth microphone just doesn't work under Linux. I do appreciate the ability to manually select the bluetooth codec in Linux where in Windows it 'guesses' and often guesses wrong, throwing it into ancient headset codec territory when I'm trying to listen to music, because who knows what has made Windows think the microphone device is open...
Networking... Linux wins hands down with VPN connectivity, much much easier to manage all my VPNs in one place in the 'casual' user scenario instead of a litany of competing 'endpoint managers' in Windows. When VPNs step on each others routing tables, well no OS makes that easy but at least Linux network namespaces makes it possible for me to have multiple network 'worlds' in one place to reconcile the conflicts...
Probably the other area where Windows has a bit of an advantage is a consistent binary driver model. In Linux if you are an out-of-tree driver, it's going to suck to keep up with changing in-kernel APIs to keep your source compatible, let alone have a module running without a recompile after a minor kernel update. I guess the silver lining is almost everyone decided to have their drivers 'in-tree' to make sure they are maintained and don't need a lot of ugly #ifdefs to contend with multiple kernel behaviors... Then there's nVidia and some commercial filesystems that either cannot or will not go in-tree...
I don't think a lived experience can be amusingly wrong but to each their own?
My issue comes because my set up is highly unusual, the third display is an infrequently used tv that's connected through a receiver. With a little bit of fighting I have a workable albeit inconvenient system. A fix is possible but as stated in the meme, it'll take some effort etc.
I assume they mean that the general sense of "Switching to Linux is easy! I'm still fiddling with basic things but any day now..." doesn't reflect their own experience, nor that of many others who had less trouble with displays under Linux.
In that context "I have an unusual setup" is an important note: It's not that Linux struggles with basic things, but that it struggles with some uncommon things that nobody ever built and shipped a proper solution for.
Absolutely true and well put.
I should have said "third display" instead of "all" because my unusual setup is important context. Honestly, I'm also probably not highlighting that enough when evangelizing about it.
To me, a big chunk of the excitement of linux is that regardless of whether linux or someone else is better out of the box, with linux, I can change whatever needs changing. There will always be some tinkering left and nothing stopping me from it!
Likewise, I prefer to stress that my system worked great out of the box. I just couldn't resist tinkering with the audio setup, because I can and wanted to. I broke something, fixed it again, all is well.
Fake!
All those words and none were "Arch".
It was implied? π€π€ͺ
I mean, they joke but inertia is Microsoft's mightest weapon.
Literally just "My computer works now, why would I want to change it?"
Incidentally, getting someone on Linux (or Apple for that matter) to switch to Microsoft is also like pulling teeth.
Also, for many people, they don't actually understand the difference between the device and the OS. You buy a laptop and thats the whole thing, including the OS.
My internal dialogue during social events: dont talk about linux, dont talk about foss, dont talk about rodents.
I will gladly subscribe to any newsletter about those three things.
The design history of the XFCE logo has entered the chat.
Did you try your setup under X? Out handles monitor connects and disconnects well, alΓΎough I need to use an extra package to restore layouts because I don't use a DE (ΓΎere are a half dozen of ΓΎem). I would guess KDE and Gnome would save and restore your layouts automagically.
I'm sorry I'm a dumb newb, who just went with Mint, I'm unsure what X is.
Mint is behind the times with this one: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewforum.php?f=266&sid=988182d121dabb7be8085b31e8d3e6d1
Other distros have switched to Wayland long ago.
Multi-monitor setups on Wayland are much less fragile, including different scaling and refresh rates.
On my Windows laptop, multi displays barely work with any logic at all.
Last time I used macOS it pretended that displays worked fine (but they didn't).
I've not used Linux much in hotplug monitor setups but I assume the situation can't be worse.
I kind of miss a thing about Windows and dual monitor system. When I turn one monitor off (it does automatically every 4h), windows would keep on working without re-assembling picture for 1 monitor. Bazzite does exactly that. Everything goes black for a few seconds and does the same shit once you turn monitor off. Annoying.
Any way for me to fix this?
There is not really a solution that I know of, though truthfully Windows still doesn't handle that in a bulletproof way either as I have a similar situation and both OSes have problems in this regard. I use both Windows and Linux for work at the same time (dual workstations for different orgs that need to be completely separate) and the Windows machine does the whole "app scramble" to a single screen about 1/3 of the time. If anything, having Linux be completely consistent is more helpful as I am ready for it.
My 3 monitor setup has been really fantastic after switching to Cosmic desktop. Really really loving the mix of tiling and non-tiling features too.
Tangential to OP but just wanted to throw Cosmic out there for folks who haven't yet tried it.
My displays work great on Debian
My displays are even more stable than Windows now. Wayland allows me to throw around applications to different workspaces and monitors that would have literally crashed if I ALT-TABed on Windows.