Displaylink

DisplayLink monitors

In order to use Displaylink monitors over USB, such as the ASUS MB16AC, the displaylink driver needs to be installed:

$ services.xserver.videoDrivers = [ "displaylink" "modesetting" ];

The module `nixos/modules/hardware/video/displaylink.nix` should also work for wlroots compositors.

Since these drivers depend on binary unfree blobs, you will need to first add it to your nix-store. Go to https://www.displaylink.com/downloads/ubuntu to get the appropriate driver version and note the download URL you get after accepting the EULA. The currently expected version for the driver can be found under: https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/downloads/ubuntu-5.8?filetype=exe.

Then (example):

$ nix-prefetch-url --name displaylink-580.zip https://www.synaptics.com/sites/default/files/exe_files/2023-08/DisplayLink%20USB%20Graphics%20Software%20for%20Ubuntu5.8-EXE.zip

Connecting a second external monitor

In order to add a second external monitor you can add the following to your configuration:

services.xserver.displayManager.sessionCommands = ''
    ${lib.getBin pkgs.xorg.xrandr}/bin/xrandr --setprovideroutputsource 2 0
'';