Issues with exernal monitor on elementary OS Juno

Question

Two days ago I installed elementary OS and now I am experiencing issues with my external monitor. I'm using a Dell XPS 15 9560 with and LG superwide monitor.

Unable to disable built-in monitor

At the office I like to work on a external monitor with the laptop open and the built-in display disabled. With this setup I can use the track pad of the laptop for scrolling. That's how I did it with the previous distro (Pop!_OS) I've been using. But disabling the built-in monitor seems to be impossible with eOS, or am I wrong?

No tray nor dock after sleep

While using an external monitor, my laptop is closed. This works fine s long as the system does not go to sleep. Waking it up is a pain because it does not listen to the wireless mouse or keyboard (also Dell). Touching the built-in keyboard wakes up the system but then I have two screens, both missing the to menu bar/tray as well as the dock. The only thing I can do in this scenario is a hard reboot.

Not dock nor tray after reboot

This morning I logged in and again, no tray or dock were showing, so I did a reboot without the external monitor. But even after a reboot, they didn't show up. I had to manually launch the switchbaord (/usr/bin/io.elementray.switchboard) though the terminal to be able to access display settings, where I fiddled a bit with the settings. After rebooting the tray and dock were back (fortunately).

Answer 1

I'm facting similar issues on HP Spectre x360. Loki worked great, but Juno is terrible.

In response to Unable to disable built-in monitor, I have found a way to turn it off:

1. Find out the display names:

   xrandr | grep conn | grep -v dis
   

2. Disable the desired display:

   xrandr --output <display> --off
   

On my machine, first command returned:

eDP-1 connected 1920x1080+0+6 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 293mm x 165mm
DP-1 connected primary 2560x1440+1920+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 553mm x 311mm

Then to switch off the primary laptop built-in display I simply did:

xrandr --output eDP-1 --off

I know it is not a solution but it is a start. I am intrigued by your other problems too so it is a scenario that I will be testing next.