Dell D6000 and Big Sur
 

I'm running an old Mid-2014 MBP which is on the latest supported OS (Big Sur 11.7.10).

I've setup a D6000 dock (known good working with Windows and a newer mac on a newer OS) with a couple of old screens in my workshop. I'm using 2x DP to VGA adapters to connect the screens (VGA D connector) to the dock.

I've installed Displaylink Manager 1.9.0 (build 148) plus the login screen extension.

The D6000 is powered and I'm powering the Mac from a magsafe power brick. I have the D6000 plugged into the laptop via a USB port.

When I run with the macbook lid open everything is fine - all three screens work fine (macbook + 2x external). If I close the lid, I can correctly continue using the two external screens but two odd things happen.

1. Every minute or so the macbook appears to try to sleep. It wakes up and picks up where it left off with keyboard/mouse input.

2. It seems like the device thinks the macbook display is still on as I don't get a dock pop up when I take the cursor to the bottom of the screen where it would drop down to the macbook display if the device were open.

Rebooted. SMC reset.

Any ideas how to fix this?

Closed-display mode, also known as clamshell mode or operating with the laptop lid closed is not supported with Macs that have an Intel processor and are running macOS 11 Big Sur and are using DisplayLink devices in conjunction with the modern DisplayLink Manager Application.

An Intel-based Mac must be running macOS 12 Monterey or later in order to support clamshell mode.

Wow, a lot of conditions there. So I can't upgrade to OS12 as it's a 2014 model and that's not supported, I'm stuck on 11.

"in conjunction with the modern DisplayLink Manager Application"

So is there a less 'modern' way of supporting displaylink without this application, a legacy driver? I can't believe that there was never a way to run displaylink screens in clamshell mode back in 2014 when this device was new?

Prior to the current implementation of the DisplayLink Manager Application, the DisplayLink driver used a kernel extension in order to provide its functionality. This approach was deprecated by Apple in macOS 11 Big Sur, hence the creation of the new App.

If your Mac was running macOS 10.15 and running the legacy version of the DisplayLink driver, you would be able to use clamshell mode.

My reference for this information is here --> https://kb.plugable.com/questions/724337

Well I was going to go to a lot of effort to use a hack to upgrade my Mac OS to a newer unsupported version using opencore, but glad I tried the obvious solution before going to all that hassle.

For anyone else who finds themselves with this issue - all I did was uninstalled the latest version of the displaylink manager application and then installed the legacy release:

DisplayLink USB Graphics Software for macOS
Catalina 10.15, Mojave 10.14
Release: 5.2.6

Rebooted, allowed screen recording permission and all is working perfectly on BigSur 11.7.10

Hope this helps someone else.