Simon Krenger

Due to COVID-19, like many others I am currently working from home and as a result I took the chance to update my home office. Working with a small laptop screen for months is not optimal, so I went the ultra-wide route and got myself a Dell U3818DW monitor.

Since I did not find a lot of information about running this monitor with Linux, here is a quick overview. To summarize, everything works out-of-the-box.

The nice thing about this monitor, apart from it being 38″ and having a massive amount of screen real estate, is that it features an USB-C connection. This USB-C connection will both connect the monitor to the laptop (a Lenovo ThinkPad T480s in my case) and charge the laptop at the same time, so really only one single cable is necessary.

Now those that already fiddled with Thunderbolt / USB-C know that sometimes it is a bit challenging to get things working on Linux. I am running Fedora 32 with the standard GNOME / Wayland setup.

But in this case I was really surprised on how smooth everything went. Plug in the USB-C cable to the T480s and everything worked out-of-the-box! The display, charging, sleeping, USB hub, all of it. Amazing.

The native resolution of the monitor (3840 x 1600 px) is excellent to have two windows open side-by-side and there is enough vertical resolution to stack multiple windows.

The monitor also works well with the current MacBook Air, although there you’ll most likely need to scale the display resolution to get a comfortable working space.