>the monitor draws 30W even in standby

That's absurd. There are regulations on standby power.

https://dl.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_electronics_...

>Power Consumption

>0.2 W (Off Mode)

>0.3 W (Standby Mode)

Doesn't seem to be an isolated case:

https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/monitors/up3...

>UP3216Q, drawing 23 watts in Standby? (2019).

I guess a takeaway from OP is to measure your actual standby power draw.

So the solution is to complain and get a replacement unit it seems.

Maybe the behaviour is triggered by displayport cables with pin 20 connected.

http://monitorinsider.com/displayport/dp_pin20_controversy.h...

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000132935/the-20th-...

i hope more overlapping regulations than what energy star covered

Energy star is going away.

Author doesn’t even compare it to a second solution.

Interesting to know, but I just use a hot key to attempt reconfiguration if something goes wrong. Works for me even if it’s not a sign Linux is ready for non-technical users.

Yes, I didn’t want to analyze and compare different solutions, I just wanted to share the joy of finding a solution that works well for me.

Using hot keys is nice, but hot keys (intentionally) don’t work while my screen is locked. I contemplated mapping an xrandr call onto a smart button (Shelly Button 1, essentially triggering an HTTP request), but in the end grobi has the same effect and is even more convenient than having to press buttons.

My windows laptop disconnects my monitor sometimes seemingly randomly. A sign that windows is not ready for non-technical users?

Hardly, given the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

You’ve never had to support windows non-technical end users I see.

That's a silly assumption, and a silly point. By that reasoning, no OS is suitable for non technical users.

> By that reasoning, no OS is suitable for non technical users.

That was the point GP was trying to make (a bit snarkily and sarcastically) in response to the argument that Linux is not suitable for nontechnical users.

Right, but GP is dead wrong. Windows and MacOS are far more suitable for non technical users on average. Mint is great for people that have standard hardware and need nothing more than a browser, but it's still not on par with the big two.

That Linux is less accessible than windows or MacOS may be true (I personally agree with you about windows, less so about macOS), but if an argument is not acceptable about windows, it can't be accepted about Linux either. If both OSs seem to suffer from difficult-to-fix issues when turning monitors on and off, that can't be the reason why Windows is more non-tech friendly.

I think that this is the bulk of the argument here.

> Does grobi work on Wayland?

See kanshi, which has a similar rule matching approach.

im sensitive to coil whine and i hear it everywhere : computers, light bulbs, phone chargers, you name it and if im in the same room as electronics i hear a high pitched squealing that others seem not to notice or care about. its inescapable and it sucks

I used to be. One high speed camera I could tell the frame rate consistency from the flash recharge whine.

But one day a young engineer asked if I could hear my circuit when the load changed.

I could not. I have become what I hated. The cycle continues.

It's 2025. You really shouldn't be using X11, which is effectively end-of-lifed.

Thanks for the advice. I try switching to Wayland every year, but it has never worked without heavy graphics artifacts / flickering / glitches on any of my machines (I use an nVidia GPU so that I can drive my Dell UP3218K monitor).

Meanwhile, X11 works really well for me. No tearing, no artifacts, no breakages on upgrades. Really can’t complain.

Maybe next year.

There are still plenty of reasons to use X11, mostly for software that doesn't support Wayland yet.

Or: stable and finished.

Either that, or a dead end. X11 stayed afloat thanks to the endless extensions, in particular Xcomposite. Windows and OSX have had full modern graphics stacks for 20-25 years, by default. OSX in particular has provided backwards compatibility in a similar fashion as XWayland does (via Carbon).

Every developer who cared about X11 has moved on; it receives little to no maintenance. We already have hardware/software where X11 is entirely unsupported. It's likely we'll see more in the future.

Display tech keeps evolving. Proper scaling on HiDPI displays, HDR -- these are things X just doesn't (and will never) have support for because of its architecture. Wayland is the path forward. ALL of the developers who know anything about the display stack have committed to developing for Wayland and deprecating X.

We should be using Rio then?

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.

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?

> 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".