Context: this is a legit screenshot I took on my workplace around 1.5 years ago. Hopefully it’s been patched by now? Completely ridiculous behavior

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    8 months ago

    Lenovo docks need firmware updates to work right. When they work they work great, but Lenovo docks sure are bitches when they don’t work.

    If all your USB devices stop working, that sounds more like a hardware fault or a laptop issue to me. Something is killing the USB subsystem, which is either a driver issue or something in the CPU (which handles USB these days).

    It’s possible the monitors are somehow negotiating something that the CPU doesn’t actually support (which would still be a laptop problem) or maybe there’s something fucky going on in the hardware, but I doubt it’s got much to do with generations of anything.

    I had to mess with some BIOS settings to make Lenovo docks work right. I can’t remember if it was because the dock wouldn’t work unless or because I had it connected on boot, but I believe I had to disable some thunderbolt relayed security system until a BIOS update finally fixed it.

    That said, my thinkpad has a normal HDMI port but that’s not working right on Linux, unlike the docked outputs which seem to be working a lot better. Something to do with the USB video being routed to the Intel GPU and the HDMI being connected to the Nvidia GPU if I recall correctly. Just goes to show that going back to the olden days isn’t necessarily the solution…

    • HerbSolo@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Thanks for your input. I think there’s some software bug causing this, the same hardware worked without issues for years and now, not all of us are affected (all devs are using the same laptop) Anyways, I won’t waste too much time analyzing this, I’m doing mostly home office as a workaround and the ops guys are going to take a look next week.