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.

  • Ænima@lemmy.zipOP
    1·
    8 hours ago

    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 kscreen or kwin shared 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!