DisplayLink USB docks

Basic to intermediate difficulty - Only suitable for you if you feel comfortable:

  • using the command line

DisplayLink, developed by Synaptics, allows video output over USB and is commonly found in USB docking stations. Because it is a proprietary and closed protocol, it ties you to supported operating systems. This knowledge base article explains how to get DisplayLink to work on Linux.

Officially supported: Ubuntu LTS

The official download page lists the supported operating systems. At the time of writing, the LTS releases of Ubuntu are the only supported Linux setups.

Ubuntu-based distributions

Although not officially supported, the official driver usually works on the most recent Ubuntu releases and on most Ubuntu flavours; Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Budget, etc. The official driver may also work on other distributions, that are based on Ubuntu, such as Mint, Elementary OS, Zorin OS, Pop_! OS. In my case, the DisplayLink driver worked without any issues on Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.3 and Kubuntu 25.04.

KNOWN ISSUE: SecureBoot may prevent DisplayLink from working. Disabling SecureBoot is not recommended. Refer to my knowledge base article DisplayLink issue with SecureBoot, or to Synaptic's own knowledge base article, here: https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/1181617-how-to-use-displaylink-ubuntu-driver-with-uefi-sec

Fedora, CentOS, and other RPM-based distributions

The following is a repository that provides the DisplayLink driver for Fedora, CentOS, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux OS.

Download drivers: https://github.com/displaylink-rpm/displaylink-rpm
Note: if yo udo not see your distribution in the list, click "Show all x to see all driver packages."

After downloading, just doubleclick the downloaded file to install.
Alternatively, use the command line: sudo dnf install <filename>

For example: sudo dnf install fedora-43-displaylink-1.14.14-1.github_evdi.x86_64.rpm

KNOWN ISSUES:

  1. DisplayLink may require you to disable SecureBoot.
  2. DELL D6000 docks may cause issues

For details and solutions, see: https://github.com/displaylink-rpm/displaylink-rpm

Do it yourself build

Expert difficulty - Only suitable for you if you feel comfortable:

  • cloning source packages from GIT
  • building your own packages

It is possible to build your own driver, regardless of what Linux distribution you use. This is however only suitable if you have extensive experience with Linux.

Sources:

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