Dell KVM and KDE on Alma

Support
1

Hi, I connect my Alma Laptop running KDE to my Dell Monitor with a KVM via a single USB-c cable which manages power and display. However, in this config, when the laptop goes to sleep, it turns off the monitor, even if the monitor is displaying the other PC. Also, I can’t turn off the monitor without pulling the USB-C cable out of the laptop, which is annoying, as then it’s not charged.

I’ve used this configuration with a windows laptop, and everything worked as expected there. My other desktop machine connects via hdmi.

Does anyone have any ideas whether this is a KDE problem, a remnant of Gnome problem or something else? Any suggestions gratefully received.

2

I’m using older kit on 8.10, using AlmaLinux for a few yrs as main system.

I gave up trying to get HDMI or Nvidia to work. I have a couple of KVM switches and one needs power to work so if there’s nothing coming from the pc it’s out. The other messes with the video signal so I have to manually set resolution.
There are other issues with sleep - see below.

On the other hand windows didn’t work with the bluetooth, kept undoing my fixes with every update, and regularly went down for several hours trying to update itself before falling over completely…when it wasn’t thrashing the hd.

If you can you might just try a separate power source for the switch.

My notes from last time I looked at sleep/suspend/hibernation (was a while back so couldn’t tell you what’s in there in any detail);

TLDR;

Don’t use sleep/suspend/hibernate on a bare metal OS.
(unless the OS and all drivers have been designed for it and then u need to look at any other issues - see below)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/r4a4so/interesting_fedora_does_not_support_hibernation/

contains a number of reasons Fedora don’t support hibernate.

Some are bogus eg. not using swap ( that doesn’t stop u saving ram to disk somewhere ) .

However, there are valid reasons. Most notably devices can’t be relied upon or
even expected to boot back to the same state from cold. Eg. a program might write to a driver but the state on the actual hardware might not be initialised.

The only way to get the benefits of hibernation looks to be by using a VM but there are problems there too if you get into it.

Even suspend/sleep suffers from the same issue:

See also:

Red hat systemctl suspend/hibernate etc. :

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/configuring_basic_system_settings/shutting-down-suspending-and-hibernating-the-system_configuring-basic-system-settings

Link no longer works but it was there ! they probably moved it.