MacOS is perpetually losing the physical position of my displays. 95% of the time I plug my laptop in the display layout swaps them. I would understand if it was 50% of the time, although I'd still be frustrated, but the fact it happens reliably is beyond me.
Been using multiple monitors with macOS for at least a couple decades at this point. I switch back and forth between macOS, Windows, and Linux regularly—so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on experiences from other OSs. My macOS setup is completely stock these days. I don’t see what the problem is, could you elaborate?
I have five monitors. When it works, it's great. The other 5% of the time it's a giant pain in the butt. I don't know why this part of macOS is so incredibly buggy. It often forgets the arrangement, the HDR setting, and the refresh rate.
I wrote a little program to detect when it breaks and set it back, but they don't have APIs for refresh rate and HDR so it's only a partial fix.
I've half a mind to take a job there, fix it, and quit.
I'm going to suggest again that Apple still has stuff to do here. For example, on another setup I have 2 very different monitors, 38 inch wide 3840x1600 LG and a BenQ 32" 3840x2160. They don't have the swap problem but MacOS just screwed up and even though I have the BenQ set to Scaled at 2560x1440, MacOS just put it at 3840x2160, and, when I went to go fix it, System Prefs showed it set to 2560x1440. To fix it I had to pick another resolution and then set it back.
There's clearly work to be done on Apple's part here.
Another common problem I have is switching from no external monitor to external monitors. Usually the process is I'm on my laptop on battery. Close the lid. Come home. With lid closed plug in monitors one via USB-C, the other via a Thunderbolt dock, tap an external keyboard to wake it up.
Quite often (once a week?), MacOS never switches on. Often I open the laptop and MacOS flickers all 3 monitors and never recovers (have given it several minutes). Unplug the monitors and there's an 80% change the laptop monitor will come on. Re-plugin the external monitors, wait for them to come on, then close the laptop. The other 20% of the time the Mac never comes on and I have to hold the power button to hard rebooth. This happens on both a 2019 Intel/AMD MBP and an M1 Max MBP. This situation also happens with the 2 identical monitors but the swap probably happens multiple times a day where as the "it can't get itself started" problem happens once a week.
Just want to note I have similar problems on MacOS especially when using multiple monitors. I.E. one monitor will work and the other won't until I restart.
Literally all of my issues revolve around display issues. I honestly don’t understand how developers at Apple don’t fix these things... If I am getting up/down from my desk throughout the day and plugging in and unplugging a monitor, sometimes my screen is just _stuck_ black and requires a hard reboot. Other times, it shows the login screen on both monitors. Yet other times, it decides it didn’t actually detect that monitor.
Most folks on my team have the same deal to differing amounts. We don’t use any special software.
This actually used to be a common problem I would have on macOS, especially when docked to an external display. I wonder if these problems are connected somehow.
I can't get over how badly MacOS works with external monitors; I have a fiddly 5ish minute Mac boot cycle process somedays because there it just refuses to output anything.
It has been the opposite for me since about Windows 7.
Work MacBook - have to restart it to get USB ports to work, screen flickers when you plug in an external monitor like X windows on an Unix terminal from '99 with a bad conf file... Comeon.
> But when I turn off my displays that are on HDMI or DVI or VGA, the computer still detects them like normal, like they're connected, because they are.
But since they’re off, that doesn’t make any sense, now you can’t reach any windows on those monitors. I think the macOS behavior make the most sense, move them so you can access them, but move them back once the display is turned on.
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