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.
Definitely. Display link docks are a no go. The video out was pretty crappy last time I used one in 2014.
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 a couple of things that will get in your way with this.
Bandwidth
Let’s go with the bare minimum of your high end given what you want:
- running both of your displays at 4k 30Hz 8bit only will require 6.66Gbps per display
- 2.5Gbps networking is self explanatory
- assuming you only want USB 2.0 ports, 480Mbps per port
without overhead, that’s ~17Gbps. USB 3.2 Gen 2 can do 10Gbps, and USB 4 can do 20-40Gbps, so it would need to be a USB 4 dock at minimum, which means new and most likely above your budget. Your low end could probably be done on USB3.2 Gen 2, but you’re still going to come close to your budget or blow it.
Multiple displays
Running multiple displays from a single usb-c port is not great. you can do it with thunderbolt docks just fine, but they are all going to blow your budget. With usb-c your options are a single display per port on your machine with displayport-over-usb-c implemented, or multiple displays using multi-stream transport (MST). MST is known to be extremely finicky and generally not worth the hassle in my opinion.
Recommendation
If you need multiple displays (on top of the HDMI 2.1 port on your machine), either dedicate both usb-c ports to it and use two cheaper docks, or go all in and get a thunderbolt dock like the Caldigit TS4.
Thanks for the info! 🙂
I may jump to the Caldigit TB dock based on reccs in the comments.
$150 is the most I’m willing to spend on a USB dock. 😆 Above that, I might as well jump to a TB dock.
This was more of a cheap stop gap solution to my many cables getting plugged into the laptop problem.
The Anker 575 can drive dual 4K monitors at 60 Hz and is supported by Linux, although I’ve best luck driving one monitor with a dedicated laptop USB C port. It currently retails above $200 though.
I have a dongle I bought from Walmart that works well. It is Onn brand.
Most usb-c devices should just work
Tb3 is supported on that, go with it, found one for 129 or so on Amazon. Tb3 is dramatically better than usb-c in every way, mostly because usb-c means different things to different vendors while tb3 is a genuine standard.
Edit: shit you got tb4, if you get a tb4 caldigit you’re set for life but they’re expensive af, love mine. They’re a single cable solution for everything, 2x 4k easily, think I’m at 4k+5k and it’s fine.
Awesome, thanks! The Caldigit is my holy grail dock. 🙂
I wasn’t finding much info about TB and Linux, so I was reluctant to drop that much cash for something that may not work.
Tb support on linux is arguably better than usb support.
Google boltctl to authorize the dock and you’re golden, stuff just works for me, though honestly I didn’t use my pcie dock on linux.
Good to know. 🙂
A dock with external PCIe might be interesting, but I don’t have any plans the require that right now. 😆
