Displaylink Woes

A few months ago, I purchased one of those USB portable monitors for my laptop. This one to be exact. I followed the Arch wiki on getting displaylink up and running and everything was great! Well, I couldn't control the brightness or the screen rotation, but the fact it was working at all had me pretty stoked. That is, up until a few days ago.

Some update (I've poured through my pacman.log and couldn't pin-point which one) broke the entire portable display functionality. It took me about three hours to get my computer to even recognize the device again when it was plugged in and another three to get it to display anything. When it finally worked again I nearly flipped my table over out of excitement.

So, if any other Arch users are struggling to get this thing fixed again, here's what I did:

1. Uninstall evdi and displaylink (assuming you installed the packages from the AUR).

2. Follow this guide to manually install the evdi-pre-release package and blacklist udlfb and load udl.

3. Reinstall displaylink from the AUR, but edit the PKGFILE and remove the evdi dependency.

4. Enable and start the displaylink systemd service.

5. Run 'lsmod' to check if the evdi module is loaded (if not, run modprobe and get it on in there!)

6. Reboot

Not gonna lie, I have no idea why this worked. It doesn't really make any sense. But the important part is that it did! Hopefully it will work for you too.

Cheers.

EDIT: I did manage to figure out what was breaking it. It was the evdi-pre-release 1.5.0-9 package in the AUR. So what is outlined here is effectively downgrading evdi-pre-release to version 1.4.1-8. I also added displaylink and evdi-pre-release to IgnorePkg in /etc/pacman.conf to prevent this from happening again.

tl;dr Downgrade evdi-pre-release