Mint & Multiple Monitors

HI Everyone,
I got mint installed on another laptop (easy, no issues!). My current set up is:

  1. Left Monitor - connected to laptop with HDMI cable via usb C hub
  2. Laptop in the middle
  3. Right Monitor - connected to laptop directly with HDMI cable

My issue is when I try to move across screens, the mouse will go from left monitor to laptop and stop. To get to the right monitor, I have to go back from laptop, to left monitor and then it’s on the right monitor. There isn’t smooth scrolling across all screens as with my windows machine with this set up. My expectation is scrolling would go from left monitor, to laptop then to right monitor. It seems to go in a counter clockwise circle instead.

I’ve tried to make adjustments in display/layout. I’ve moved the monitors around, changed primary and active and nothing. When I was moving the layout around, it seemed to not understand what was what because it would recognize the laptop as one of the monitors and vice versa.

I did try to plug both monitors via hdmi cable into the usb c hub but then it recognized them as the same monitor and would only extend displays between the two. My laptop only has 1 hdmi port so I can’t try it with plugging 2 hdmi cables directly into laptop. I did try with 1 hdmi cable and 1 vga cable with the same results.

I also have my settings for left hand mouse. Not sure that matters as I tried with right hand mouse and same issue.

Does anyone know of a way to fix this? Thank you!


Have you tried dragging the monitors shown in settings? You can drag them around to different locations.

1 Like

Hi Will. Yes I’ve tried that multiple times, in multiple ways and it doesn’t seem to do anything :frowning_face: After moving things around, when I “detect displays”, it sometimes it gets confused and doesn’t seem to identify that the laptop is the laptop and will label it the BenQ monitor and vice versa.

I tried following these instructions: How to Extend the Gnome 3 Panel to Dual Monitors but when I open the Tweak tool I don’t have the “extensions” option on the left side to get to the multi-monitor configurations. I’m not sure if I installed something wrong as these instructions were for Ubuntu and I’m using Mint (Cinnamon).

Here’s what it looks like from my end. In the layout section is where I have moved them around every way I can and it doesn’t seem to change anything for some reason.

1 Like

I’m not sure how I did this but I rebooted and somehow the issue is fixed! I can go back and forth from either direction between all monitors!

2 Likes