Like on any operating system, using a second monitor on Linux can help you be more productive while working or more deeply immersed in virtual worlds while gaming.

Adding a second monitor may sound complex, but setting up multiple external displays on Ubuntu is easier than you might think.

Prerequisite: Picking a Monitor

First, you will need to have at least one external monitor ready to use. If you have an older monitor that can only use VGA and your system only has HDMI ports, you will need an adapter to hook it up.

If you are already using an external monitor and want a better experience, try to get a second external monitor that is the same size as the other one. Ideally, consider getting the same model. That way, when you put them next to each other, the mouse won't "jump" as you move the cursor from one monitor to another and the picture quality and clarity will be much more consistent.

Configuring Your External Monitor on Ubuntu

Once you have the hardware ready, turn on your system. After the desktop has been booted, connect your additional monitor(s). Ubuntu will try to automatically configure the new monitors.

While Ubuntu should be able to detect the best resolution, it probably won't detect which monitor is on the left and which is on the right. To change this, you can go to Settings and click on Displays. Or, you can right-click anywhere on the desktop and click on Display Settings.

Ubuntu display settings

Here you can modify the settings of your monitors. The region in the upper half of this window allows you to rearrange the monitors so that Ubuntu knows which one is where. Clicking on each one will show a little box of info in the corner or at the bottom of the selected monitor.

If you click on the monitor that Ubuntu thinks is on the right, but the little box of info appears on your left monitor, then you need to drag that monitor around to the left of the non-selected monitor.

Hit Apply, and Ubuntu should now know which monitor is placed where. To select one of them as your primary monitor, click on Primary Display, and from the drop-down menu, select the monitor you wish to set as your primary display and click on Apply.

Selecting primary Display

If you have such a setup, you can also make the monitors use a portrait orientation instead of the standard landscape orientation, and you can also have monitors above and below each other rather than just left and right.

Selecting a single display

If you're on a laptop, and you'd rather use an external monitor than the one included on your laptop, you can easily choose your internal display and turn it off so that the graphics chip doesn't have to waste resources on pushing pixels to your internal display.

Click on Single Display and from the list of monitors select the monitor you wish to run as your only display and hit Apply.

Steps to Follow if You Have Proprietary Drivers

Using your GPU's control panel

If you don't use Intel graphics or open-source versions of the NVIDIA or AMD graphics drivers, then you may (or not if you're lucky!) have issues with using Ubuntu's tool for managing monitors. If this is the case, then you'll need to go into your proprietary graphics driver's configuration utility and make the needed changes there.

The concept is essentially the same, but making the changes depends on how the utility presents you with the options. However, the Ubuntu-specific options such as where to place the launcher bar, will still need to be done in Ubuntu's configuration tool. You'll just have to avoid tinkering with any other monitor settings while using it.

Possible Issues and How to Solve Them

In most cases, you shouldn't have to deal with any issues in configuring additional displays. The only issue that you might ever come across is that HiDPI support isn't quite complete. Meaning if you're using a system with HiDPI settings enabled (such as on a MacBook Pro Retina), then any additional displays will have those same settings applied. This means that everything on those displays will appear massive.

Other worst-case scenarios you might have to face are blurry text or blank screens. An easy fix to the blurry text problem on Linux would be tinkering with the HiDPI scaling settings and figuring out what works for you.

To deal with blank screens or refresh-rate-related issues, purging and reinstalling the graphics card drivers should be the fix. Should you face screen tearing issues, you can also fix it in multiple ways.

Setting Up Multiple Monitors on Ubuntu Is Easy

Using multiple monitors on Ubuntu is dead simple. A lot is already automatically detected, and the configuration tool that comes with Ubuntu is straightforward so any required modifications can be applied quickly.

So if you want to do it, go ahead! It's as easy as can be. However, if you are running into display-related issues often, then it might be wise to switch to a different desktop environment.