Does anyone have USB-C dock recommends?
I have a Thinkpad P1 gen 4 running Fedora I’m going to be using as my desktop replacement, and I’m looking for a Linux friendly dock.
I don’t need the dock to do much. Ideally, it could drive 2x 4K DisplayPort displays, have a 2.5Gb+ Ethernet port, and a couple USB-A ports, but 2x 2K DisplayPort and 1GbE work too.
Preferred price is <$150.
DisplayLink compresses everything over usb. If you plan to do anything color sensitive (ie photo editing) or latency sensitivite (ie: games) it’s a bad idea sine it’s all cpu compression.
That said. They are great for multi monitor general usage (ie soreadhseets and shit) or for systems with graphic card limitations on multi display output (ie low end macs on m1/m2)
They work in a pinch but even on windows they always end up causing more trouble than it’s worth. I recently got a client business, a lawyer’s office, where their previous IT got them all Startech displaylink docks. After I replaced a couple of them where the users had some lower end i3 laptops, searches they ran in their document management system finished in maybe 50% of the time.
Good processors like the M1 you maybe can’t notice but they cripple the lower end systems.
There are quality docks that work on displaylink. The dell D6000 is one example and we issue them out freely at work.
Most third party off brand docks will have higher failure rates. We see that with some anker docks that were usb-c+pd we use/had to source during the great supply chain snafu during covid. They worked in a pinch but aren’t reliable like a Lenovo or Dell dock. That’s less a displaylink thing and more a cheap dock thing.