The Dell UP3218K monitor I describe does not work “out of the box” on any OS. Even finding a GPU that can drive it at all is tricky.

It should work with tiled output, so long as a) it reports tiled geometry in DisplayID b) the driver handles it right.

Then it should show up as single display.

It's also how Apple XDR display presents itself to MacOS (two DisplayPort 1.4 tunnels over USB4, tiled layout in DisplayID).

I suspect it's possible that it doesn't have a valid tiled geometry block, but that's something that was already handled right when first 4k displays landed, so...

I use both Linux and Mac, and in my experience Mac's handling of multi-monitor setups and, specially, of them changing, is only slightly better than Linux's.

For most situations you do not need to do anything difficult to plug any number of monitors to a Linux computer with a modern, full-featured distro, other than arranging them. Mac does a better job of remembering your setup and adapting to a monitor disappearing, but it's not that much better.

I'm still not sure I understand why the author needed this tool, may be because they have more than one computer plugged into the same monitor?

Both Gnome and KDE handle (un-)plugging external monitors just fine. And Wayland has been the standard in all relevant desktop distributions for a couple of years now.

> while Wayland leisurely moves forward

Debateable. But it sure started with huge step backwards. On X11 all relevant functions are at least standardized within the xrandr protocol. On Wayland you don't even have that. So it really depends on the compositor if it works or not where each is doing its own thing which is just crazy. I prefer the 70s standardization model of "mechanism, not policy".

X11 was made in September 1987, long after the 70s. All of the older ways of doing graphics were killed by it due to technical merit.

Thanks I didn't realize it was so new

> older ways of doing graphics were killed by it due to technical merit.

The issue here is that a server/client architecture complicates things a lot when it's all the same machine and the security model is different

> for some reason works out-of-the-box pretty much in Windows

mostly. With first releases of Win 10, it was more than challenging.