this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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I'm using Ubuntu on my Dell XPS 17, connected to a Dell Dock via USB-C, that has 2 monitors connected with Displayport. Sometimes on signal acquisition, screens remain black, and I have to lock the session (Win + L), wait a few seconds, then wake up the laptop, so signal may or may not be correctly acquired (otherwise I'd do it again until it works)

On Windows, there's this shortcut, Win + Ctrl + Shift + B, that acts as if the screen were disconnected/reconnected. It may help with my signal acquisition problem. Is there an equivalent on Ubuntu/Linux, please ?

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[–] BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Ctrl + alt + backspace is the shortcut for killing X (which manages the desktop display) which will then restart.

This is the closest equivalent to the windows shortcut which restarts the graphics subsystem. It does not restart the drivers on windows, instead it reinitialises the display after flushing things.

However note that In linux, killing X will also kill all the programs running which depend on it. You will essentially restart your entire session. This is due to how X works and there isn't an alternative.

Note some distros disable the shortcut be default now and you have enable it first. You will need to google your distro. I believe Ubuntu disables it, and possibly Gnome on all systems? I use neither, that is just from googling so may be wrong.

I am not aware of a Wayland equivalent.

You can also switch TTY using (Ctrl + alt + F1 to F8) to switch to a different "teletypewriter" - basically a full screen terminal display. You can login and then run commands including killing X and even restart the graphics drivers here. You could make a script that does this which you can run in a TTY if needed. You can't restart graphics drivers while X is running on the GPU; X has to be killed first.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 6 points 1 day ago

The [Super]+[P] combo might be useful. This is for display switching, it should rotate between:

  • internal only
  • external only
  • extend display
  • duplicate display
  • display off (all)

On KDE you can hold down [Super] and rotate through the options by tapping [P]. I'm not sure how this is normally configured on Unity/Gnome, it may require selecting an option with the arrow keys and then pressing [Enter].

[–] Luffy879@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

I mean, you would create a macro that runs a script to stop wayland and run it again

Or at least hardcode your Monitors in the script and turn them off and on