tl;dr - Does anyone have a docking station + laptop + 3 monitor setup and is it working without any special "fixes" or "tweaks" and if so, what distro are you on?
I'll start with my setup to give some context
- Laptop: ASUS ROG Strix G513QE - has the Nvidia 3050Ti and a Ryzen 9 5000-series, 16GB RAM
- Docking Station: Dell WD19S USB-C (not thunderbolt)
- Peripherals: Keyboard, Mouse, Webcam, 3 monitors (1 connected by HDMI the other via DisplayPort)
I got the laptop a few weeks ago and was excited to jump back to Ubuntu as my personal daily machine (work laptop is Windows 11 due to some required windows-only software).I'm used to Ubuntu-based distros and so far have tried Pop, Elementary and Ubuntu itself. I've installed all 3 distros on the laptop. With each distro there was one or more of the following issues connecting to the displays via docking station (direct HDMI works as far as I can tell):
- Docking station and everything connected isn't detected
- Peripherals on docking are detected but monitors are not
- Display detected after updating displaylink drivers but system freezes up or hangs every 2 seconds (especially Ubuntu Wayland and PopOS!)
- Displays are detected but after a reboot, gnome or pantheon doesn't startup (system boots into terminal)
I've tried so many tips and recommended fixes one at a time.
- From installing specific versions of the Nvidia drivers (470 as opposed to latest),
- using Wayland instead of X,
- gone on the dell forum where display link driver update was recommended,
- downgraded to an older version of each distro (hoping it was more stable)
and have had no luck. I've had to temporarily re-install windows to get some stuff done for now but I'm still hoping to switch. Everything works fine on Windows confirming this isn't the fault of the hardware.
Was reluctant to switch to another distro but honestly at this point I'm desperate to jump the windows ship more as I find Linux much more developer-friendly (looking at you home-directory-name-changing OneDrive) but it seems the issue is with the desktop manager itself and not distro.
Does anyone have a similar setup and is it working without any special "fixes" or "tweaks" and if so, what distro are you on?If not, what issue did you find? Perhaps I'll have to look into a "linux-friendly" docking station