this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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USB-C Dock Reccomendations (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by jollyrogue@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Does anyone have USB-C dock recommends?

I have a Thinkpad P1 gen 4 running Fedora I’m going to be using as my desktop replacement, and I’m looking for a Linux friendly dock.

I don’t need the dock to do much. Ideally, it could drive 2x 4K DisplayPort displays, have a 2.5Gb+ Ethernet port, and a couple USB-A ports, but 2x 2K DisplayPort and 1GbE work too.

Preferred price is <$150.

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[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are a couple of things that will get in your way with this.

Bandwidth

Let's go with the bare minimum of your high end given what you want:

  • running both of your displays at 4k 30Hz 8bit only will require 6.66Gbps per display
  • 2.5Gbps networking is self explanatory
  • assuming you only want USB 2.0 ports, 480Mbps per port

without overhead, that's ~17Gbps. USB 3.2 Gen 2 can do 10Gbps, and USB 4 can do 20-40Gbps, so it would need to be a USB 4 dock at minimum, which means new and most likely above your budget. Your low end could probably be done on USB3.2 Gen 2, but you're still going to come close to your budget or blow it.

Multiple displays

Running multiple displays from a single usb-c port is not great. you can do it with thunderbolt docks just fine, but they are all going to blow your budget. With usb-c your options are a single display per port on your machine with displayport-over-usb-c implemented, or multiple displays using multi-stream transport (MST). MST is known to be extremely finicky and generally not worth the hassle in my opinion.

Recommendation

If you need multiple displays (on top of the HDMI 2.1 port on your machine), either dedicate both usb-c ports to it and use two cheaper docks, or go all in and get a thunderbolt dock like the Caldigit TS4.

[–] jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the info! 🙂

I may jump to the Caldigit TB dock based on reccs in the comments.

$150 is the most I’m willing to spend on a USB dock. 😆 Above that, I might as well jump to a TB dock.

This was more of a cheap stop gap solution to my many cables getting plugged into the laptop problem.