tl;dr: want dual 4k@60Hz Thunderbolt 3 docking station for Linux that will also power my laptop. Know of one?
Hi, everyone!
I was hoping someone here had experience with Thunderbolt 3 docks, because they’re very expensive and that makes taking my chances on them an unhappy proposition.
I am stuck with a 2017 MacBook Pro at work, which as you may know has only four ports (besides the 3.5mm audio jack), all of them Thunderbolt 3 (and also ofc USB type C). Since I use a couple of external monitors at work and I use an external keyboard and mouse, I use a Thunderbolt 3 dock there, and I love it. One cable supplies power, plugs me in to my keyboard and mouse, hooks me up to ever-reliable wired Ethernet, and a 4K@60Hz display along with a secondary display that’s just FHD.
I have a non-power-supplying version of that TB3 dock which I use at home because while the dock seems to work on Linux despite being unsupported, the model that supplies power will only drive one display on Linux. (I don’t know the reasons, but I haven’t tried updating my Intel Thunderbolt controller drivers because they’re not packaged for my distro and I’ve been too lazy to package them yet.)
Looking around online, I haven’t found a clear example of one that I know will be supported in the way described. This dock from Targus looks good in that it actually advertises Linux support, but it has a very troubling footnote about the feature I care most about:
Supports dual-display (May support single display only based on platform implementation)
I’d really love to be able to use one dock at home to connect my ThinkPad 25 and my work MBP to the nice little workspace I’ve set up at my desk, and without having to supply power to either device separately, as I’ll be docking the laptop inside of a cramped desk and there’s already a ton of cables running through it.
(Only one of the two monitors I’m using at home is 4k×2k@60Hz; the other is 2560×1440@idc how many Hz. But given that, again, these devices are very expensive, I’d like to get one that I know can do UHD@60Hz on both displays so that I can keep it for a long time.)
Does anyone here know of a setup that will actually do what I want? Alternatively, in the case that it’s not currently possible, can anyone tell me what needs to change in the Linux driver stack so that it will become possible?