XPS 13 9300 and WD19TB linux problem

Hi @emapex . Try to use display port instead of hdmi. If your monitor have not DP input, use a DP->HDMI adaptor.

I have same trouble as you sometime  (25% of time)... But I never succeeded to have output with HDMI cable. This product is not finished. I really hope Dell will release new version of dock and BIOS...

Hi @ForTwisted , thanks for the suggestion.  With the DP cable suspend and wake gives only the external monitor with the laptop display showing just the Dell logo.  Shutdown and boot didn't work the first time and after a couple minutes the WD19TB light turned off.  Then pressing that light/button resulted in a grub menu to which I took the default which started the same kernel as before (5.6.0-1034-oem #36-Ubuntu SMP).  Again, the laptop display has only the Dell logo.  With the HDMI cable the display system would have been in mirror mode with the laptop display the same as the external.  Interesting.  

Quick update.

It does seem that system load has a part to play in the problems I have seen.

After everything working well with the workarounds mentioned here I decided to play a bit of World of Warcraft (no judging) at lunch when connected to my external monitors. After about 10 minutes I started to get stability issues with the external displays, it steadily got worse over the course of another 10 minutes or so before I quit the game. The issues I saw were main screen flickering, second screen turning off and on and main screen seemingly shifting to the right and the displaying what would of been off screen on the left of itself.

Now I am back in the desktop the issues went away immediately.

A quite side note, possibly unrelated to these issues. When I ran windows on this laptop I was able to get 100hz output to my 144hz monitor through the Intel software, however I could only get that through one of the TB ports and the other would only give me 60hz max. I feel that I have also had better stability through that same TB port in Linux when it comes to the screen issues but I haven't been able to prove that. I was under the impression both ports should have the same spec? As I said I don't know if this is related or worth worrying about.

Some update, maybe it'll help better understand the issue. 

I disconnected the external monitor from the WD dock and connected it through a usb-c device, all other connections (ethernet, power, and USB keyboard) were connected to the WD dock. All worked smoothly. Connecting the screen back again (whether it was DP or HDMI) - the issue is back again.

I use Ubuntu 20.04 (after upgrading from 18.04)

Looks like I spoke too soon ... it's all reverted to the previous situation ... frustrating in the extreme!!!! Having tech-refreshed the monitor (as well as the laptop), sad to say it really looks like the only way to drive the 4K monitor from my Linux LT (XPS13 9300 - Ubuntu preinstalled & upgraded to 20.04), via a KVM switch, is to return the Dell and look elsewhere.

All appears to be working as well as expected with a direct drive i.e. USB-C - HDMI 4K, cable, but that does, of course, entail using up one of the 2 thunderbolt capable ports; However, since the USB problems persist until I replace the docking station with my own USB-C hub, I can only put all of the problems down to the docking station and/or drivers and am investigating the return of the WD19TB for a refund.

My problems seem to have cleared up after updating the BIOS using XPS_13_9300_1.4.1.exe.  Shortly after that I updated to kernel 5.6.0-1036-oem #39-Ubuntu and all seems fine.  I have not tried all the corner cases but for the past two days my external monitor lights up correctly after suspending and rebooting.  FWIW, I'm using xfce rather than Gnome.

I have a similar problem with my dock tb16 and ubuntu 20.04

Last summer I updated my WD19TB  dock using: WD19FirmwareUpdateLinux_01.00.14

Well, I spoke too soon.  Just now recovering from suspend did not turn on the external monitor.  Neither did logging out then logging in.  Restarting the whole computer brought back the external monitor.  

A workaround in the meantime if you don't want to go down to 1080p: 

I completely removed the dock from the equation. I connected my XPS 13 directly to my two monitors using only USB-C to USB-C and ran all USB (Including Ethernet via an adapter) through my Dell monitor's USB Hubs. Caveats are 1) Your monitors would need to have Thunderbolt & USB hubs 2) Expect lower network throughput and higher latency 3) You can do 4K on two monitors, but only at 30Hz. I personally just use HD+ (2500x1600) @ 60Hz.

As I look at my dock, I think it's a terrible waste, but this is allowing me to hobble along until Dell fixes this.

One of the old symptoms just reared up just now: after exiting suspend (by wiggling the mouse) the laptop and the external monitor are now mirrored.  Before this they had not been mirrored, with the external monitor as the default.

Happened again: the external monitor didn't light up when waking from suspend.  This has happened twice now after updating to the newest BIOS and kernel.  Both times have been after the system has been suspended for more than a day.  Perhaps that symptom helps those trying to fix this problem.

BIOS: XPS_13_9300_1.4.1.exe

uname -a: Linux lt9 5.6.0-1036-oem #39-Ubuntu SMP Wed Dec 2 08:54:16 UTC 2020 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

laptop XPS 13 9300, dock WD19TB, monitor Dell S2319HS

Yes - it's actually shocking. I spent a lot of money on a new XPS 13 9300, the WD19TB, Dell Ultrasharp monitor and a bunch of other Dell peripherals and it's so ludicrously unreliable, I'm thinking of junking the lot. I had three months of Dell support guys pretending they read my problem reports, asking silly questions, s asking me to do what I already did and then told me it's normal behaviour... "Normal behaviour" would include inability to sleep the laptop, hibernate that just switches on again by itself, pick-up of the WD19TB that means disconnecting power from it, pressing the power button for 30 second and then reconnecting power... That's "normal" I'm told. It's wasted me so much time, I can't tell you. I used to have a Latitude with the old style dock and it behaved perfectly every single time. This new Thunderbolt set-up is so poor, it's untrue. I may just bin the dock and get a different one, but I think it's also the laptop. Anyone found solutions to making this reliable?

So far, the only thing that has provided reliable functionality for me is to never allow the system to suspend.

If I let the system suspend then various combinations of the following commands can bring the system into a state where I can use the external monitor.  But there does not seem to be a consistent set or order of commands which works.  And, one needs to wait a while between the commands.

xrandr --output DP-3-1 --off

xrandr --output DP-3-1 --mode 1600x900

xrandr --output DP-3-1 --mode 1920x1080

xrandr --output eDP-1 --mode 1920x1200

xrandr --output eDP-1 --mode 1920x1080

xrandr --output DP-3-1 --auto

xrandr --output eDP-1 --right-of DP-3-1

# eDP-1 is the laptop screen

# DP-3-1 is the external monitor

From some of the responses to the above commands it's as if (1) some code is not waiting for some hardware to become responsive and/or (2) the pipeline of commands is not flushed correctly.

Changing the display resolutions seems to trigger changes.

A side effect of some of the above commands is that the Ethernet connection is broken temporarily as if the whole dock is being rebooted.  That does not seem correct to me.