In all my years I have yet to see HDMI output from a laptop to a monitor work on the first try in Ubuntu. Always need to install the proprietary drivers for that to work at all. If it can't even do that without a headache, after 10+ years of Linux use, I would call that a Linux problem, not a hardware problem. My colleagues seem to run into the same issue frequently as well. This article seems kind of ignorant. I'm glad it worked on the first try on his ancient ThinkPad. That doesn't mean Linux is stable enough for most normal use cases on most hardware for me to recommend it to any of my non-tech proficient family.
What Laptop is this? I never had an issue with the external outputs on any laptop I owned (and I've been running Linux since the 90s). I also don't know anyone who had these issues. The main issues I had were typically docking stations and suspend (but that has been super stable for my last 3 laptops).
Laptops with iGPUs usually work pretty well. The ones with built-in discrete graphics cards can become kind of a mess to configure. A friend had one where, if I remember correctly, he'd gotten the built-in screen working with (I think) the iGPU, but anything into the HDMI port switched it over to the dGPU, which had some of those crappy NVIDIA drivers, causing both screens to shut off or something like that. (I didn't debug it so this is just an outline of the problem).
This was a long time ago, but I had an HP Envy 14-1000. It had an Intel iGPU with a separate AMD card.
It was a muxed setup. The screen was switched back and forth between GPUs and one would power off as needed (assuming everything went well). The HDMI port was only connected to the discrete GPU. T here was no way to get video out on the Intel card. By default, Linux would power on both, but use the Intel.
This was well before any AMD cooperation, and I had the laptop much longer than the FGLRX setup was supported. The open source Intel driver and simply turning off the AMD card was eventually the only way I could get it to run.
Even in Windows it was a strange setup. You had to manually switch, and when you did the screen would turn black, you'd wait a few seconds, and now you were on the other GPU.
I'm sure the situation is better these days, but after that experience I just stick to integrated.
Windows 10 fixed this sometime around the end of 2020, where you have igpu and a discrete - prior to whatever patch they pushed, if you alt tabbed out of a fullscreen game, there was a good chance that the game window would be a 1" square when you alt tabbed back, if it didn't crash in the meantime.
The "black screen for a couple seconds" thing is still there, you just don't notice it, and once a game has "started" the discrete GPU, you can seamlessly switch back and forth.
some people are mentioning that "i can't believe it took 10 years for this to get fixed" - however back in the late 90s this exact scenario was the most common power gaming setup, with 3dfx cards you'd have 3 cards, two 3d cards with SLI, and a 2D card, usually an intel. The same black screen for a couple seconds, and switching between the desktop and a game had the potential to break things.
The "automatic" switching between igpu and discrete was managed on windows before 2011, because i had a laptop with that setup in 2011 and it would detect 3d applications and use the discrete for that, or you could force one gpu or the other, if you wanted.
I've never had any issue with HDMI or DP output. But it's true that my only laptop with a dedicated GPU was an MBP, all the others have or had integrated graphics.
Intel seems to have the best GPU support. My Dell XPS from a few years ago works fine with Thunderbolt dual monitor dock and USB-C to HDMI adapter.
My desktop with a AMD Vega 64 crashes weekly (with occasional stable months) running Fedora (usually about 1 minor version behind mainline) since I've gotten it (maybe 3-4 years ago now)
If you had problems with the HDMI output, I suppose that it must depend on the GPU model.
I have used Linux on many laptops and I never had problems with the video outputs, but most of them had NVIDIA GPUs and a few used the integrated Intel GPU. I have no recent experience with AMD GPUs on laptops.
I do not normally use Ubuntu, so that might matter, but when I bought a Dell Precision, it came with Ubuntu preinstalled and it worked fine until I wiped Ubuntu and I installed another Linux distribution.
I used once a Lenovo on which I had to waste a couple of days until I made the GPU work properly in Linux, because it was an NVIDIA Optimus switchable GPU, but even on that laptop there were no problems with the video outputs, but only with the OpenGL acceleration, until it was configured in the right way.
Your laptops have Nvidia GPUs, I suppose? In my experience, that's the one brand to avoid when shopping for laptops to put Linux on. (Though you can usually get things to work, with some of effort.)
