Well Damn. So my #Alienware m15 R5 *seemed* to finally have a working HDMI port after a fresh install of #Debian stable. Then I installed the #Nvidia drivers and... poof... no more external display.
So I still have a two year old laptop with a great GPU, tons of ram that can't be used with a monitor.
And my main workhorse, an #Asus from 2019 that works just fine.
Sometimes I literally just SSH into the "good machine" to put it to work with #Pytorch.
So my "good" laptop - the most expensive thing I've bought in many years - continues to be sidelined because I'm stuck staring at the little laptop screen and can't have my nice external portrait display for #Jupyter notebooks... grr... arg.
Apparently and absurdly it seems to have something to do with #Linux V DRM. There are incomprehensible instructions online which fail to fix it. My hardware refuses to use an external display 'cause of DRM rules (cause I might watch a movie over HDMI?)
@stevenaleach yeah, that's not fun. HDMI is proprietary. My cable box refused to work with a HDMI cable before because it wasn't "compatible". End having to buy a better version of said cable online.
@stevenaleach have you tried a USBC to display port adapter? I think the USBC port should be able to carry a display port signal.
@muel No... No I haven't. I have absolutely no idea what "display port" is, how USB could have anything to do with video, nor why we don't just have normal VGA connectors anymore.
Supposedly it would have worked with Windows but that doesn't really matter and is of no use to me.
@muel Seriously... everything just "always worked" with every "normal" (VGA port, VGA connector) monitor I ever used.... then those went away and now there's "HDMI" and it's hit or miss whether any device will or will not work.
So I own a laptop that I won't be upgrading for many years to come that just won't let me use external monitors.
I guess I could figure out how to do some kind of "remote desktop" thing from my other laptop that *does* know how to run an external monitor???
@stevenaleach display port is the other modern standard for video connections. I'm not 100% sure it would work for you or that your laptop supports outputting display port over a usbc connection but it is probably worth trying. https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=44469
Also I fully agree that modern standards suck, unfortunately it's the world we live in.