20
Tamrael
6y

When my company moved to the big city we all got new equipment. I selected a ThinkPad and two 24" Dell monitors. Most got themselves a MacBook pro and a 27" Samsung monitor.

Once the new great arrived I started my journey to free the poor ThinkPad from the spy-software that is windows and install Arch.
Everything went smooth until I connected both monitors via MST to the single mini Displayport. Screens flickered, flashed or started dark. Even the display inside the ThinkPad. After half a day of trying to get MST to work with the Nvidia/Intel hybrid graphic inside my ThinkPad I installed Windows on the second ssd and got some actual work done.

The next day I finally managed a static xconf that had all three displays in just the right configuration and I started to work on Linux.

The story would end here if Arch wasn't Arch and I had not installed updates when I did.

After about 6 month of happy working on Linux Paradise I updated Arch since it was overdue (two weeks without). Shit hit the fan. Cinnamon's display manager didn't like my xconf and crashed during startup. Sadly from previous experience I knew that this was the only dm that would work somewhat stable with my hardware comp. I tried to debug, created multiple issues on the various GitHub repos and invested another week into it before dropping Linux again.

I never doubted my knowledge of Linux more than during the times I tried to get MST working with Nvidia/Intel graphics on my ThinkPad.

Recently I switched to a 27" one monitor setup and I'm back on Arch without any trouble because MST isn't in the mix this time.
I guess the story had a happy end after all

Comments
  • 1
    Arch is brilliant and all but it hardly ever 'just works'
  • 1
    Thinkpad + nvidia + Linux
    The deadly combo 😄
    (I keep the only driver that works safe from updates. Not arch, gentoo, so a little more control over upgrade or changes)
  • 1
    @nbamaral gentoo is my server os. Maybe I should use it for desktop as well. I love emerge

    @loopback I have very few problems when using Arch. On most desktops it just works right after setup and keeps working. This MST setup was the first time something broke so bad I couldn't fix it myself. BTW I tried mint, Ubuntu, Debian and a handful of others with this setup as well. Most wouldn't even boot to login screen because the display managers were not capable of handling the Nvidia MST combo
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