Multi Screen Hub

[johanwasserman]

How do we get Ubuntu to get serious about multi (more than two) screen support on hubs and docs?

Who's with me in wanting to use four, six screens, and going through hell day by day trying to get displaylink to keep those screens up?

These days, multi-screen support shouldn't be an option, it should be part of the package...

I'm not aware of anything other than displaylink so more than happy to get educated.

Cheers,
J.

[DuckHook]

By far the biggest impediment to what you want is not Ubuntu or Linux; it is the manufacturers and vendors of equipment that could not give two hoots about Linux support. You should be addressing your complaint to them.

Almost all Linux drivers are painstakingly built from a clean room reverse engineering of equipment that most manufacturers only care to provide Windows and Apple drivers for. The job that these developers do, many of them volunteers, is one of the most incredible yet unacknowledged contributions to the Linux-sphere. Most of us tend to use the fruits of their labours with hardly any awareness of or appreciation for the value of their work.

Displaylink is actually one of the few vendors who produce Ubuntu drivers for their products, but we have no idea of the quality of their driver (I believe it contains binary blobs) or whether their OEMs implement properly. These vendors know their product better than anyone else and presumably have the expertise to make good Ubuntu drivers. So why don't they?

BTW, I used to run a four-monitor setup out of my HIS AMD HD 7950. This was simplicity itself. One monitor was attached to each of the ports. Since this card has one HDMI, one DVI and two DP ports, each port supported one monitor. Had I invested in active DP splitters (mine were passive—actives being too expensive), I could have run 6 monitors, with each DP daisy-chaining 2 monitors. They all showed up on the system display utility running the plain-Jane radeon driver and I could configure them easily and out of the box. In other words, with the right video cards, multiple monitors are already well supported.