I recently set up a dual boot on my older HP Envy i7 running Windows 10, and everything worked perfectly, including detection of external displays. However, when I tried the same on my Lenovo Legion i9 at 3 AM (because why not?), I ran into a problem. Despite updating everything and messing with settings, my laptop doesn't detect my two external displays—one is connected directly to the GPU and the other via a USB-C dongle. I'm wondering if I should switch from dynamic to discrete settings to resolve this issue, but I fear that would affect my Windows 11 setup too, which I want to avoid. I'm also contemplating removing the Linux partition altogether since I use the Xbox, Battle.net, and Steam apps frequently. If I decide to delete the partitions, is it as simple as removing them and using the command prompt to eliminate the boot option? Thanks for any help!
1 Answer
First off, make sure you have the Nvidia driver installed and loaded. You can check by running ```nvidia-smi``` in your terminal. If the driver is good, you might just be encountering an issue with the X11 system. Wayland generally has better multi-monitor support, but unfortunately, Linux Mint doesn’t have a fully supported desktop environment for Wayland right now. If you want to stick with Mint, consider exploring different desktop environments like KDE or Gnome that support Wayland better. But before you jump ship to a new distro, try switching your Nvidia drivers first to see if that helps!
I think I might have made that mistake too before! I initially had external displays working when I first booted up, but it stopped after I updated to the recommended Nvidia driver. I’ll retry using different driver versions as you suggested. Thanks for the tip!