I feel pretty good about this as I have only had Linux installed as my daily driver since late October 2025. This machine is the only exposure to Linux I get, as I work as a Windows sysadmin. I run openSUSE LEAP 16.0 with KDE and while I can’t say I’m comfortable or even within spitting-distance of being comfortable with it, I feel like today moved the needle a bit more towards that.
This started a few days ago with my three displays. I run an LG 34" curved display as my main monitor and two 27" CRUA curved displays on the sides of it. Previously, I had experienced no issues with this setup when using Bricklink Studio 2.0 via wine. However, on Thursday night I quit Studio and boom, my side monitors wouldn’t stay on or detect a signal, and my main display kept freaking out and blinking every 5-7 seconds. I could get one of the two side monitors to work, but not both with the main monitor.
Long story short (DP->HDMI adapter swaps, cable changes, port arrangements with the graphics card, etc.), I used DuckDuckGo searches (lots of the results came from the Arc forums, my consolences) and was pointed toward log files for kwin. I used the Logs app on my machine to check the important logs that would appear when I tried to have both monitors plugged in. That showed me that it was having trouble finding or removing some reference object. I looked in the Display Configuration settings and noticed the monitors would pop up, last for about 5-7 seconds, then get disconnected within the same time frame as the logs. I also noticed that when they would be visible, the ‘Enable’ checkbox would be unchecked.
So with my trusty vertical mouse in hand, I studied the placement of the buttons and checkbox and after a few fails, successfully selected the checkbox to enable one of the displays, apply the change, and select keep before it could fully disconnect the monitor. Boom! The monitor turned back on and stayed on. I had to adjust it’s position in the layout, but after that, it had no issue being on! I repeated this for the other monitor and now, I am happy to say, all three of my monitors are on and my system is running exactly as before!
I really appreciate the openness to information that I see in many of the Linux communities, and thank you to those of you who have contributed, or will contribute to that knowledge. Because of people keeping that information open and available, a complete and utter Linux-n00b like myself can take a shot at investigating and fixing my own system woes.
Best regards!
P.S. I have a theory about what happened with wine and why the issue wouldn’t happen with one of the side monitors plugged in, and only happen when both were. But I’ll save that for a comment if someone asks.
Multimonitor can have some issues sometimes.
My issue was stuttering (& at times it acting like it discovered a whole new monitor without a configuration) … it took me months to … connect the TV (which was seemingly unaffected) to another port.
Woof, this was a rollercoaster. Ah, the struggle and the triumph, the hard-won knowledge and the enthusiastic urge to explain the problem and the solution. The joy of fixing something you love and need.
🥲 Congratulations, you are a true Linux user.
Aww thanks!
So something disabled your monitors and you were able to get them back by quickly enabling them during the brief period of time that they were visible. The monitors should still be listed in the display configuration even if disabled. May be worth filing a bug with kde. Seems like a massive oversight if that isn’t the intended behavior.
So something disabled your monitors and you were able to get them back by quickly enabling them during the brief period of time that they were visible.
That is correct. I don’t remember what online resource I found, but one of them mentioned where to find the
kscreenorkwinshared files. There were multiple files: one with just a GUID for the display and one for the type of connection. I noticed that there were combinations where one GUID would be DP-1, HDMI, DP-2, etc. That got me thinking about the whole settings/config files stuff and what led me to watch the actions of the Monitor Configuration screen more closely to understand what was happening.The monitors should still be listed in the display configuration even if disabled.
But only if they’re plugged in at the time. And plugging them in would blank the other side monitor if connected, and lead to my main monitor flashing and glitching as it kept finding and rejecting the other monitors over and over. They’d constantly disappear and reappear from the configuration screen every time it happened, causing any changes I made to the configuration, which were not applied before they lost the connection, to be lost.
May be worth filing a bug with kde. Seems like a massive oversight if that isn’t the intended behavior.
I may do that. However, outside of my experience with closing a wine app leading to this, I’m not sure if there’s an easy way to reproduce it. Regardless of where I go from here, I am happy it is back to working, and thank you for your comment and questions!
I used DuckDuckGo searches (lots of the results came from the Arc forums, my consolences) and was pointed toward log files for kwin …
i started using deepseek to figure out small problems that i have and it occurred to me the other day that, if i had deepseek 25 years ago, my linux adoption would have happened much sooner.
back then, i had to rely on google searches and the good graces of other people in forums like this and i managed to muddle my way at first like you’re doing now; but if i had something like deepseek, i could have gone it alone and it makes me envy people that are getting into linux and foss today because of it.
I was sold on genAI until I realized how capitalism was trying to pervert and monetize the wrong parts of it. Now it just seems like a means to an end. An end I don’t want to participate in.
Yes, LLMs are great.
Using them & supporting megacorps that concentrate wealth, promote the shittiest things, and degrade equality/equity/democracy is just immoral.
agreed and precisely why i use deepseek instead of something like chatgpt
What is your theory?
I posted this in another comment in this same thread, but figure I’d just paste it here for you!
I don’t know how wine works fully, but I know a bit about how Windows works. Based on my use of emulation and VMs, wine strikes me more as an emulator. Windows expects a certain structure and wine sets up a sort of emulated instance of that environment. If I’m correct in my assumptions, wine has to get control information about the monitor from Linux to display the application correctly when it’s being emulated. When I closed Studio 2.0, I believe wine failed to pass this monitor information/control back to Linux. Linux didn’t think it should have the monitor control cause wine never passed it back, so every time the OS detected the monitors, it would essentially say, “no thanks, you should be hanging out with wine right now!” and disable the monitors within Linux. This caused the monitors to basically disconnect. Since wine had closed, there was nothing to take that control back, so the monitor just reappeared on the list of OS hardware to take control of, and would again say, “no thanks,” over and over.
Again, I may be completely off-base and merely speculating, but when I managed to quickly toggle the monitor back to enable and save the configuration, it changed the handling of the monitor to forcefully tell Linux to take it back and use it, which broke the loop. Again, not sure, but it was quite a journey. Glad to have all my monitors back to 100Hz and super glad my graphics card doesn’t need to be replaced!
Thank you for your question!
I appreciate you taking the time to reply!
Careful there, WINE Is Not an Emulator (yes, really, that’s what it stands for—back in the 90s, we thought that recursive acronyms were cool. See also GNU).
What you saw could indeed have been a bad handoff, assuming it didn’t persist through a reboot. If it did, then it sounds more like a KDE (or Wayland?) bug.
At the time it was using X11. But changing to Weyland was one of the things I tried. Seemed whatever the fault, it persisted through reboots and those changes. Is there something that both X11 and Weyland check when processing the handshakes?
That sounds like bad data got written to some config files, because a reboot should have corrected a simple bad handoff and restored the preconfigured state. Might have been interesting to see what
xrandrhad to say about those monitors at the time, and whether it could have fixed them.Anyway, sounds like your side monitors got disabled, and rather than re-enabling them when you exited WINE, something in the stack decided they’d always been that way . . . but because they were still powered and connected, the monitors still said “hi” every few minutes, and then got identified and swatted down again. I doubt I would have had the hand-speed to re-enable them through the GUI the way you did.
I’ll take a look at the logs and see if I can find the error chain at the time of the connect/disconnect loop.
I doubt I would have had the hand-speed to re-enable them through the GUI the way you did.
Never doubt your abilities to ninja this shit to get back to your ideal workflow! That monitor being down those few days really messed up my jive!
Heh. I’m old and my reflexes are dropping off. Plus, as a Gentoo user, I tend to reach for the command-line tools first.
That is simultaneously ridiculous and amazing. Blindly clicking the buttons to enable the screen definitely proves you’re getting familiar with the OS.
Why do you think wine/Bricklink messed it up in the first place?
That is simultaneously ridiculous and amazing. Blindly clicking the buttons to enable the screen definitely proves you’re getting familiar with the OS.
Thank you for the kind words and I completely agree! I feel like I’m more in control and simultaneously more willing to tinker, with my computer when it has these issues, rather than just dumping files and/or reinstalling or something drastic like I would have done in the past. One of my friends from childhood swears that he can’t get into Linux and always ends up going back to Windows. I think he suffers from the same issues I had before I just accepted that I am back to being a complete nub and can only take my cursory knowledge of PC troubleshooting to investigate and fix Linux issues. I accepted my ignorance of the OS and expect to face issues I have to learn how to fix. I think that’s the mindset that a lot of tech-savvy people may need to adopt when moving from Windows to Linux full-time. However, that’s just my personal opinion and what’s worked for me!
Why do you think wine/Bricklink messed it up in the first place?
I don’t know how wine works fully, but I know a bit about how Windows works. Based on my use of emulation and VMs, wine strikes me more as an emulator. Windows expects a certain structure and wine sets up a sort of emulated instance of that environment. If I’m correct in my assumptions, wine has to get control information about the monitor from Linux to display the application correctly when it’s being emulated. When I closed Studio 2.0, I believe wine failed to pass this monitor information/control back to Linux. Linux didn’t think it should have the monitor control cause wine never passed it back, so every time the OS detected the monitors, it would essentially say, “no thanks, you should be hanging out with wine right now!” and disable the monitors within Linux. This caused the monitors to basically disconnect. Since wine had closed, there was nothing to take that control back, so the monitor just reappeared on the list of OS hardware to take control of, and would again say, “no thanks,” over and over.
Again, I may be completely off-base and merely speculating, but when I managed to quickly toggle the monitor back to
enableand save the configuration, it changed the handling of the monitor to forcefully tell Linux to take it back and use it, which broke the loop. Again, not sure, but it was quite a journey. Glad to have all my monitors back to 100Hz and super glad my graphics card doesn’t need to be replaced!Thank you for your question!
I remember when I was a kid messing with Windows 95/98, I had this intuitive feeling of what was happening under the hood. Just like how you describe your theory. Honestly you’re probably on the right track. In theory on linux you can actually dive into the source code and try to figure out what’s actually happening, but that’s intimidating AF. Hard to say if the problem is between wine and the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), X11, Wayland, KDE, or the GPU driver…
I had a kind of similar problem with my display not outputting when it was connected. I had to use a DRM file in
/sysandudevscript to fix it, wrote a blog about it. If your monitors are still messed up after a reboot, it sounds like this won’t help you though.Also you made me lol to “wine strikes me more as an emulator”. It totes is. The “Wine Is Not an Emulator” name is a joke, the original name was “WINdows Emulator”, which they changed to avoid Microsoft’s lawyers.
I remember when I was a kid messing with Windows 95/98, I had this intuitive feeling of what was happening under the hood.
Especially with 95, since most was DOS, it felt very Hackers to find your way around the system. With 98 we still had some of that since things still required quite a bit of DOS to resolve. After that (consumer) Windows version, the GUI, GPOs, and pre-written batch files replaced all the manual work to investigate and resolve. I remember PNP was a god send for peripherals and drivers in XP, but we definitely lost a bit of that under the hood intrigue and capability along the way!
Come to think of it, I wonder if Linux’s dual dichotomy, and tendency to lean toward more CLI investigation and triage, will save future generations from a final blow to tech literacy brought about from Apple and Microsoft making things just work. Currently, that’s being accelerated by genAI usage and it’s brain liquefying affects. Personally, I’ll be teaching my 6yo how to move around a computer and not just ‘use’ it! I think Linux has made me a better sysadmin at work, also. All around, this Linux thing feels like a good egg!
I had to use a DRM file in
/sysandudevscript to fix it, wrote a blog about it.I’ll have to check it out! I had played with
udevrules a bit with OctoPi webcams so I’m sure some of it will remind me (read: re-traumatize me) of the fun I had in that years ago!Also you made me lol to “wine strikes me more as an emulator”. It totes is. The “Wine Is Not an Emulator” name is a joke, the original name was “WINdows Emulator”, which they changed to avoid Microsoft’s lawyers.
Arguably, when this was pointed out in another comment, I felt a twinge of embarrassed. However, your explanation lessens that sting. My understanding was not far off base from what WINE felt like it was!
Thank you for your reply!
