Just giggled as my last meme mentioned trouble with displays and appropriately, a large chunk of the replies were “well MY displays work just fine!” (And charmingly, many were thoughts of things to check, other distros etc. It’s a very kind community, though that may also be the fediverse.)
I saw that post, and honestly, part of the issue is that the pain of messing with mode-lines in /etc/XF86Config and worrying about physically damaging your CRT monitor with out-of-spec frequencies was a very real thing 30 years ago. Hence, the idea that configuring displays on Linux is fraught and difficult has stuck around, even though it hasn’t been true since the advent of DDC, and multiple displays for most use-cases has been sorted out for at least the past 15 years. Non-Linux users will still occasionally talk about displays on Linux as if we were still editing mode-lines in vi.
It’s a sore point, I guess I’m saying, and you poked it inadvertently. When I read the post, I just kind of smiled, because a few days before, I plugged the HDMI cable from a conference room display into my Thinkpad, and it lit up with an extension of my desktop. I started LibreOffice Impress, hit ‘F5’, and the presentation appeared on the big display, and the presentation notes on my laptop screen. (Actually, I was surprised and impressed at how smoothly it went.)
It’s no surprise that issues remain here and there, though. Glad to hear that folks wanted to be helpful!
That’s so wild, I had no idea of that history, thanks for sharing!
Stuff like this is why I still love social media.
I mean I fucked up my install by following the instructions for Optimus cards off the Debian wiki.
I reinstalled Debian, tried gaming specific distros, My computer still overheats when playing games