Arch Linux

sovm

Member

Registered: 2025-05-21

Posts: 1

Laptop screen goes black when connecting an external monitor via HDMI

Hi everyone,

I installed Arch Linux after having bad experiences with other distros. Arch has been special—it offers things that other distributions haven’t. However, I ran into an issue when I tried connecting an external monitor via HDMI. As soon as I plugged in the cable, my laptop screen went black and stayed that way. Nothing happened. When I disconnected the cable, the screen remained black for a few more seconds before recovering, showing the message: "Desktop effects were restarted due to a graphics reset."

With the help of AI and other forums, I managed to fix this by reinstalling the drivers for my dedicated NVIDIA GPU (as well as some other things I didn’t fully understand). However, the issue still persists when I try to switch to a different monitor—the solution only works for the specific monitor I connected, but not for others.

At this point, I don’t know what else to try. Should I reinstall the system? I’m relatively new to Linux and not yet fully familiar with everything.

For reference, I’m using KDE Plasma (X11) with the Linux Zen kernel.

Any suggestions or ideas?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,429

Re: Laptop screen goes black when connecting an external monitor via HDMI

What "solutions" did you follow exactly? If any of that involved generating a broken xorg config that will have hardcoded the other display and will likely not be necessary. The only thing you "need" to do on anything remotely modern is install the nvidia driver via the corresponding packages. And that's all there is to it.

Please post all files and adjustments you've made following things. And protip -- AI will very often very confidently lead you astray. You should not rely on them. Ask here before asking AI, we can give more correct advice and undoing whatever it is the AI told you if you don't understand the correlations of the things you're doing is likely to be much more cumbersome than asking for whatever your actual problem is upfront - in a place that has actual humans that understand the context of things.

Last edited by V1del (2025-05-22 18:16:04)