On this episode of DLN Xtend we discuss a new user question from the Discourse forum.
Welcome to episode 89 of DLN Xtend. DLN Xtend is a community powered podcast. We take conversations from the DLN Community from places like the DLN Discourse Forums, Telegram group, Discord server and more. We also take topics from other shows around the network to give our takes.
Linux support for DisplayLink isn’t great, it only supports Ubuntu LTS and it’s proprietary with open source components. That’s probably why there isn’t much of a community behind porting it even though they seem to be trying to make it port-friendly with the open source bits.
DisplayLink is also the only way i’m aware of to have a “plug-n-play” USB monitor on Linux without needing a DisplayPort compatible USB-C port.
With one exception…
Linux can do this without DisplayLink. Noralf Trønnes added GUD (Generic USB Display Driver) to the Linux Kernel back in early 2020. Also see the Phoronix article.
In short, it allows you to turn an SBC that has a USB port with gadget mode (ex: A Raspberry Pi Zero) into a USB monitor driver similar to the proprietary solution DisplayLink offers.
So here’s what gets me…
Below is the only video of this working and it’s by the creator. There isn’t any guides, projects, people experimenting, nothing. From a community and/or company perspective it’s just been DOA.
I mean if someone wants to package this into a product, this is just sitting there ready to go and I don’t see why there doesn’t seem to be any community activity behind it.
