I'm on macOS High Sierra for the spontaneity. Every morning, I go to wake my Macbook Pro with two 4K USB-C connected displays and external keyboard and mouse. Will one display turn on? Both? Neither? Who knows!
Store the screen layout using serials from the EDIDs. Why it doesn’t do this and “tries” to guess their position somehow is beyond me. I use the OWC TB3 dock with dual Asus PA328qs with the latest firmware. Because of apparently some lame design decisions, in order to run dual external monitors over a single TB3 port, you need the dock, which has one DisplayPort output, then a TB3-> DisplayPort (via USB-C alt mode IIRC) dongle plugged into the dock. This is idiotic, but I wouldn’t mind so much if it actually worked consistently. This is not the case. Half the time, when I go into work and plug in, I get 30hz sync on the monitor plugged into the dock. This is when it works at all, without having to guess if the laptop is actually on, because it’s the rMBP which has no power indicators despite having a useless oled screen across the top of the keyboard. So, plug in, wait 5-30 seconds, nothing, open laptop, nothing, unplug dock, nothing, hold down fingerprint reader (the idiotic power button on the rMBP) until...nothing happens, then wait a random amount of seconds, stab it again, wait another 5-10 seconds for the Apple logo to appear, macOS boots into recovery (reset credentials screen, because it assumed that since I couldn’t log in during a boot that I need to reset my password I guess), restart, wait for disk decryption screen which doesn’t work with my wireless keyboard plugged into the dock, type in that password on the laptop keyboard, wait another few seconds for it to log in, ensure that WiFi is enabled as my normal network connection is via LAN via the dock which isn’t plugged in at this point, log in, wait for everything to start, close lid and pray that I don’t have to repeat this, wait another 5 seconds for it to actually sleep, plug dock in, mash random keys until it wakes up, log in again, rearrange monitor layout as it’s usually swapped L/R, one monitor doesn’t work, or they both don’t work again, fix that by power cycling monitors / dock, then finally maybe do some work if it’s not yet lunch time.
For a ~$6k setup, it’s awful. It’d be awful for $1k. About 10 years ago, I had a Dell D830 running Fedora and later, early versions of Gnome shell. The dock powered the laptop and a mouse, keyboard, external drive, and two monitors. It was a single (albeit proprietary) connector, and the dock was fairly expensive (~$200 IIRC). It worked damn great, nearly every time, even with sleep States in Linux on a laptop 10 years ago.
Why is this suddenly harder than putting a Tesla on Mars? Why don’t we have good real wireless HD displays by now? The current state of affairs with Apple laptops and docking is just sad to me. I’m almost bothered enough by it to switch jobs to go there and work on fixing it.
I hit a breaking point with the Apple laptops a couple of years ago. It was actually iTunes that drove me off. iTunes Match somehow corrupted and lost a bunch of my music. Forever gone and I didn't have backups. After working with Support for a while, I finally gave up and bought a new ThinkPad T470s and put Arch Linux on it and never looked back. Things work really well and predictably. I have it dialed in just how I like it; every hardware component except the proprietary fingerprint reader is supported. Switching to a tiling window manager has been a huge productivity boost, too.
Now that office suites are in the cloud along with music and everything else, I no longer see the draw of Apple hardware for a developer laptop.
High DPI displays are common on PC laptops now, they generally work well in Linux (not so much for legacy apps but you're unlikely to use those).
I like the touchpad on my X1 Carbon, but I never used a mac long enough to really adapt my workflow to all the touchpad gestures (I think on Linux you'll be happy with general usage/scrolling/etc, but stuff like pinch to zoom is still not widely supported).
High DPI displays are common on PC laptops now, they generally work well in Linux (not so much for legacy apps but you're unlikely to use those).
Surprisingly, some Tk applications that I use irregularly actually work with HiDPI with Tk 8.6 (as in, they are scaled up with an integer scaling factor, and are sharp).
Multiple displays with different DPIs also work with Wayland (I have one 4k screen and a LoDPI display 90 degrees rotated). Though, there are some bugs with GNOME 2.26 on Wayland with HiDPI displays that are switched off and on again (e.g. some applications such as GNOME Terminal become blurry, they seem to be rendered at lower DPI and scaled up). I have reported some bugs and the gnome-shell/mutter developers are quite responsive.
I got used to the touchpad with time and the touchpad drivers have improved, too. It's really not a big deal at all after a few weeks.
HiDPI is generally pretty decent although it's slightly annoying that different layers of the graphics stack (Xorg, GTK2, GTK3, etc.) have different mechanisms for tweaking the scaling but with a few evenings of work, I have everything dialed. A small price to pay for years of use to come. The Arch Linux wiki is super helpful for this.
You want to look for windows precision touchpad support. Turns out the problem with windows touchpads was not the hardware, but the crappy drivers touchpad vendors make. Microsoft made their own drivers and if you can get hardware compatible with those you'll have a much nicer experience.
If you choose a ThinkPad, the trackpoint, three mouse buttons and the perfect keyboard together are such a nice combination I actually disabled the touchpad from bios.
You can get higher resolution displays on other laptops. As for the trackpad most are pretty good now days, although apple is probably still in first place.
I stuck with the hardware (albeit quite old) and went linux for similar reasons.
The older hardware can be quite nice with linux, but my next notebook wont be a mac, not due to value for money (spec and built quality balance is actually quite good for price these days), but because all attempts to run linux or any OSS on the more recent models are a disaster.
I know it's a traditionally good brand for compatibility, but for me they sort of dropped quite far from the top of the list since becoming a chinese owned company and for superfish etc. (To clarify my problem with it being chinese is the prevalence of injecting backdoors into absolutely everything from state or otherwise, and these days we have to worry about hardware too)
If I was to buy right now my list is roughly in the order of:
- Dell XPS 13/15
- Razor Blade (It's getting official linux support soon)
- Librem 13/15
- One of the million and one thinkpad models although I have no idea which
I'm most likely to just wait longer though :P the only thing to die on this old thing so far is the keyboard springs out of sheer wear and the battery. I'm gona replace the keyboard soon myself.
That's like asking someone with Dropbox storage to make sure they have a secondary backup on an external HDD somewhere. It's not that it wouldn't be a good practice, it's that Dropbox should be the one making the backups of their backups.
Uuuh that shit again. Had to write code long ago that tries to set outputs to clone if one of them is a projector (on X11). Seemed simple at first since it seems to be agreed upon that projectors report a physical size of 0x0 via edid. Which makes kinda sense since you don't have a fixed image size. Until I discovered that some projectors don't because the vendor thought it would be better to report an arbitrary value. Then you got setups where there's a middle box that swallows edid or just reports other random data.
EDID is a little EEPROM inside virtually all modern monitors with a standardized format, which can be read over the display cable [1]. It essentially enables "plug and play" for monitors, as opposed to the bad old days when you needed either an .INF file to install in Windows or the supported sync ranges to type into your XFree86 configuration if you wanted anything above 640x480. It contains data like the vendor, model number, physical screen dimensions, and supported display modes. There is a field for a serial number; parent is proposing using this to identify individual monitors. However, errors in EDID are quite common, e.g. using incorrect units for the physical dimensions or leaving placeholder/OEM data for vendor and model number that don't match the finished product's advertised vendor or model number. I imagine there are a lot of monitors out there with bogus EDID serial numbers, since it isn't important for getting the display modes right.
Yes the pain working with that is real. One of the funnier instances of edid messup was when we discovered there is at least one dell screen model out there that has DEL as their vendor string. They misspelled their company name.
The usual problems were missing mode lines that were actually supported (and needed) and incorrect dimensions.
> For a ~$6k setup, it’s awful. It’d be awful for $1k. About 10 years ago, I had a Dell D830 running Fedora and later, early versions of Gnome shell. The dock powered the laptop and a mouse, keyboard, external drive, and two monitors. It was a single (albeit proprietary) connector, and the dock was fairly expensive (~$200 IIRC). It worked damn great, nearly every time, even with sleep States in Linux on a laptop 10 years ago.
I dunno what you're whining about, I've had multi monitor setups on several mac laptops and they've always worked fine. Same on my desktop. Same on my work desktop. It's almost always more reliable than doing it on Windows.
Ditto as I commented above, but I’ve heard these reports from lots of technical and smart people leading me to believe there’s a real reason. As others above have mentioned it sounds like laziness on the part of peripheral vendors, but it’s a bit surprising Apple doesn’t have a workaround that makes this not crop up.
> it’s a bit surprising Apple doesn’t have a workaround that makes this not crop up.
If the problem is in fact lazy device manufacturers botching the identification data then I'm not sure how a third party could effectively work around the issue.
If I make two devices that report identical ID information there's no practical way for the OS to tell them apart.
Literally all of my issues revolve around display issues. I honestly don’t understand how developers at Apple don’t fix these things... If I am getting up/down from my desk throughout the day and plugging in and unplugging a monitor, sometimes my screen is just _stuck_ black and requires a hard reboot. Other times, it shows the login screen on both monitors. Yet other times, it decides it didn’t actually detect that monitor.
Most folks on my team have the same deal to differing amounts. We don’t use any special software.
Do you get kernel panics too if you don't follow the right sequence of "first wake from sleep then connect external monitor"? I can't believe this is still so broken.
For some reason those panics stopped happening to me after a year or so (2014 15" running 10.10.5 here). Now it just panics if I plug a DP cable in cockeyed.
I am always baffled by these reports. I’ve had nothing but success with external monitors on my last three MacBooks. What is your setup out of curiosity? Monitor brand, connection type, cable brand etc.
I’m assuming I’m an outlier because I see this in almost every thread that mentions MacBooks and I am real curious how it manifests.
Edit: reading further comments it sounds like possibly the monitors use the same edids? Wonder if you can check that easily.
I've had over the years a 2005 PowerBook G4, three 2010ish MacbookPros, a 2014 MacBook Air and a 2016 MacBook Pro. All have occasionally hung on a blank screen after lid open. The latest routinely forgets Dell screens (two identical ones at once) and I have to replug them.
Otherwise, no issues (except random kernel panics). Like brains, I'm astonished that they work at all, let alone work so well. Of course I'd like something bulletproof, but Apple doesn't seem to be able to make one.
Don’t forget it randomly picking what device to send audio to. Every day it’s a lottery for me. Is it the left or right monitor? The built in dac in my elgato dock? Or maybe it’s the laptop in clamshell mode.
Then there’s the case of it getting an ip from the docks ethernet.
And all of that is assuming the thing even wakes up.
