Have you not ever used a Linux distro? I haven't had an issue with monitors since before Ubuntu 8. Seems ridiculous you're going to claim that Linux, which dominates the phone/handheld industry, would have issues in regards to using high resolution/high DPI monitors along with lower spec ones concurrently. I think of all OS's, my bet would probably be that this is a way bigger issue on Windows than on Linux or Mac.

What you’re saying is probably valid for a desktop (especially if it doesn’t use Nvidia), but laptops (especially Nvidia ones) are still far from perfect. Personal experience with Ubuntu on a recent Thinkpad:

* When using Wayland, until VERY recently (latest nvidia drivers), the entire system would freeze when hooking up an external monitor. Okay, no problem I’ll use X.

* Hygrid graphics just completely doesn’t work, loads of glitches, glacially slow framerates on external monitors, etc. Okay, I turn off hybrid graphics in the BIOS, but that absolutely trashes battery life.

* X does not let you run different scale factors concurrently. You can’t set your laptop screen to 2x and your external monitor to 1x. Wayland does let you, but see above.

* I have two 4K monitors hooked up to my laptop. Whenever I resume from sleep, there’s a very good chance that only one or zero of the monitors is detected. They both power on, but only one (or sometimes none) of them actually has a signal. Cycling power on the monitor usually fixes the issue. My coworker has a Thinkpad from the same line but a generation earlier, and it had the exact same problem, so this has apparently been around a while and still isn’t fixed.

> Personal experience with Ubuntu on a recent Thinkpad:

Well, that's your first problem. How does FreeBSD or OSX do on it? Maybe you should buy a Linux laptop to run Linux instead of slapping Linux on a Windows laptop and expecting it to work correctly.

No, I'm pretty sure all his problems are due to Nvidia.

Try Intel or AMD; they are a lot more stable in my experience.

Don't Nvidia make open-source Linux drivers now? I honestly have not had graphical driver issues since... Well since a good while before SteamOS and such. I don't doubt you guys at all, but I only have "older" laptops that might have GPU issues in terms of overall Linux compatibility.

> Don't Nvidia make open-source Linux drivers now?

Yes, but only since very recently — AFAIK, most distros are not using the open-source drivers yet, as they don’t yet have feature parity with the proprietary ones.

I was referring to laptops, which most developers use these days.

umanwizard's reply is interesting.

Also - I have been using Linux for 26 years, if that matters. However, on the desktop I largely moved to macOS (then called OS X) in 2003.

Anecdotally, as a user of a different distribution and desktop environment, yes. Just Works.

If that's true then there's been substantial improvements on that front recently (which is good). As I recall, that was a tricky problem since your laptop screen likely runs another resolution, different DPI, etc so connecting to an additional screen makes things go haywire.

That's only with Wayland. If you don't use Wayland, the situation has been fine for a decade.

It’s the other way around. Wayland supports different scale factors on different monitors; X doesn’t.

Works on my machine, anecdotally; no Wayland, and an X window manager that hasn't been updated in a decade. Automatically resizes windows when I drag them to fit each monitor's DPI settings.

Btw, does it allow you to run different scale on the different monitors? It wouldn't really be feasible to run native 4k resolution on one monitor if everything will be tiny, so it needs to have scale. One monitor might run on 1x and the other 2x.

Yes, it does, as I said in the comment above. It resizes windows according to their DPI settings, to keep a consistent scale.

Glad to hear that. 2023, year of Linux on the desktop.