USB Type C Docking Stations - Getting Started Primer

today's video is brought to you by shells.com shells is a virtual desktop solution that allows you to have your very own desktop computer in the cloud once you set up your account you'll be able to access your virtual desktop through your web browser or via their mobile and desktop apps shells offer some great distributions too such as ubuntu mangero mint opensuse mx and others and they work directly with the community and distro developers to make their service seamless in fact they also offer windows and android desktops as well so you could test out apps for other platforms without wasting valuable ram by running a virtual machine they have 20 operating system options available and counting and pricing is simple shells offers transparent cost effective pricing and key features such as automatic backups are included once you set up your account you can get your very own cloud desktop running in less than five minutes no one does it faster and you can upgrade at any time to get more power in seconds definitely check out shells.com via the url on the screen which is also linked in the description below shells is awesome [Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to learn linux tv in today's video we're going to talk about docking stations and i have to say i love docking stations they're very convenient they allow you to essentially turn your notebook or laptop into a desktop when you're not on the go now i would love it if i was creating a video that was just telling you why i love docking stations all the reasons and then finishing the video with my recommended list of docking stations that you can purchase but unfortunately that's not the video that i'm going to be creating today because quite frankly the whole situation around docking stations is a pain in the so why are docking stations such a pain the thing is we live in a plug-and-play world if you buy a device a peripheral device from a computer store and your computer has the correct port then you could be reasonably sure that that particular product is going to act as advertised i mean if you buy a usb keyboard for example and your computer has a usb port it's simple plug it in you could use it as a keyboard if you purchase a display that has an hdmi port and your computer has an hdmi port it's a one-to-one match it's going to act as a display the peripheral will act as advertised but the problem with docking stations is that they're not that simple unfortunately now when i say docking station i'm mainly referring to usb type-c docks which are the most common dock that you can buy nowadays and if your machine has a usb type-c port and you buy a usb type-c dock you might be under the impression that all the features that are advertised on the box for that docking station will work as advertised but unfortunately the reality is not that we live in a world nowadays where you could buy a usb type-c dock that advertises something like an hdmi port for example and you could plug it into your computer you could plug in a monitor and you might not actually get anything on your display at all other than a message that says no signal perhaps the docking station even advertises power delivery the ability for it to essentially pass power through the docking station to your notebook to keep it charged but that might not work so what i'm going to do in this video is talk to you guys about docking stations but in particular the challenges if nothing else give you guys the information that you need in order to make a more informed purchase also at the end of the video i'm going to talk about individual docking stations that i have used personally that have worked fine for me so at this point i want to basically clarify what i am talking about and what i'm not talking about when it comes to docking stations the short answer is that i'm talking about usb type-c docking stations other types of docking stations do exist some of them are even proprietary but i'm not talking about those in this video but i do feel like i need to talk about them a little bit just to kind of let you guys know what the difference is the subject of a docking station is not new we've had them for quite some time now some business class notebooks for example actually have a port replicator on the bottom and then your notebook essentially just sets into that docking station or connects to it physically and that's called a port replicator but also known as a docking station as well and if your notebook actually has a port for a proper port replicator you should probably buy that instead i mean generally speaking you could find them for about 15 to 30 us dollars on ebay so if your notebook has a port for that it's probably the best bet nowadays notebooks aren't really manufactured with port replicator ports anymore at least as far as i know so in this video i'm going to be talking about usb type c docs which is actually what's replaced port replicators as we used to know them so going forward if i mention the terms dock or docking station for the remainder of the video just assume that i'm talking about a usb type-c dock which is generally what you should go with there's other types of docking stations out there but usb type c docks that's what you should go with because they're the most common so at this point you're probably wondering what kind of software might i need to install in order to make a docking station work will i need to install a driver maybe some sort of software what will i need in that regard and the answer is nothing there's no software to install there's no driver that's required docking stations use standards and all operating systems actually support docking stations out of the box with no added software being required if you do see a docking station out there that you're thinking of purchasing and it does require the installation of a driver or some kind of software don't buy it there's absolutely no excuse literally zero excuse for any company out there to enforce any kind of software for a docking station again they use standards so software and drivers that's really not necessary one of the most common offenders here is display link you'll often see this when you go to google docking stations for example you'll see display link listed on the technology page or product page for that particular doc and if you see that don't buy it if you did just buy a docking station and it's a display link docking station return it the reason why i say that is twofold one again software isn't necessary and the other reason why i don't like display link docking stations is because the software that they do require is finicky especially on linux i mean it works most of the time but they only support you know a few distributions basically ubuntu lts i mean god forbid you're using anything else other than that you may or may not get it to work but what's worse is that even if you do get it to work i've seen it just abruptly stop working and i've had to do some kind of combination of removing software re-adding software playing around with it trying different usb ports eventually it'll start working again then it'll stop it's just horrendous don't buy display link and return it if you did buy one already avoid display link and make sure you search for display link on the product page to make sure that that's not there that's not present that it doesn't use that technology and you should be fine there's dozens of docking stations out there especially on amazon that don't use display links so finding a docking station that doesn't use display link is not hard at all so now what i'm going to do is talk about the individual features of docking stations and what's required to make them work and the first feature that i'm going to talk about is the concept of a usb hub most of the time these usb c docks are usb hubs i mean that's what they are they have other ports as well which is why we classify them differently from you know a standard usb hub versus a docking station because a usb hub isn't going to have a you know mini display port or something like that that's something that a docking station is going to generally have but all of these docking stations have at least one usb port and most of the time they'll have like two or three so they'll act as a usb hub which is pretty cool the ability for such a dock to act as a hub for usb that's a no-brainer so that's actually the only feature that works on everything any dock you buy it should work as a usb hub so if that's all you wanted a docking station for you can actually stop watching the video right here but honestly if all you wanted was a usb hub you should probably buy a usb hub because well they're cheaper than docking stations for the most part but if nothing else the first feature that i'm going to mention when it comes to docking stations is for them to be able to act as usb hubs and honestly that's easy that i mean they just work it works on everything we're good there so we could just move on now let's talk about display specifically the ability to connect a display to a docking station and this is going to be the number one reason why most people actually buy a docking station the ability to connect a display to a docking station is literally what allows you to essentially turn your notebook into a desktop when you're not on the go because well you connect your keyboard your mouse and your display to the docking station and then you connect the docking station to your notebook and now it's a desktop but unfortunately this is the first feature that is not universal that not all notebooks can do now you would think as a consumer that if you buy a usb type-c dock and you plug it into a usb type-c port and that dock has an hdmi port or display port on it that it's going to allow you to view you know your computer on that display but honestly not always so what makes the difference then actually what makes the difference is whether or not your computer actually carries displayport over usb type-c and the thing is some computers do some computers don't now if you look at your notebook you might see a displayport icon next to a usb type-c port perhaps you have more than one usb-c port on your computer maybe only one of those ports actually has a displayport icon next to it if that's the case then that one usb type-c port is probably the one that allows you to use a dock with an hdmi or displayport on it because it carries display signals over usb type c some notebooks actually all of the usb type-c ports will carry display which is pretty cool but not all of them do and worse you can't even tell whether or not your computer supports displayport by actually looking at the usb type-c port there might not be an icon and just because there's not an icon doesn't mean it's not able to do that it just means that either well it can't do that or the manufacturer decided that they're not going to bother and put an icon next to that port there's no consistency here and that's going to be the theme through the rest of the video the lack of consistency that's the main problem i mean if it was a rule that every notebook manufacturer had to include some kind of a icon or designation next to a port if it supported you know something like display that would be great because everybody would know you just look at your computer it has that icon next to the port okay you're good you could go ahead and buy a dock unfortunately it's not that easy so what you actually have to do unfortunately is check the specification or the spec sheet product page whatever for your computer and find out which usb type-c ports if any support display and that alone determines whether or not you can use a dock with displayport or hdmi on that computer because again your computer has to carry display over usb type c if it doesn't do that then well there you go you can't actually use that feature another thing to be careful about is that some computers actually have bio settings that disable the ability for display over usb type c by default i have no idea why any manufacturer at all would actually want you to enable a bios setting just to enjoy that feature but it is what it is so if it doesn't work for you you could check the bio settings but again we run into a standards issue i mean what's it going to be called in the bios i have no idea what the option is going to be called because it's different again we have a lack of standardization which is our main problem the next feature that i want to talk about is power delivery with power delivery you can actually connect a usb type-c charger to your docking station plug the docking station into your computer and your computer will actually charge over usb type c and that's great because if that's the case then you can essentially attach your dock just one cable and that charges your computer gives you hdmi or display port connects your usb keyboard mouse all the things and that's great just connecting one cable for all the things that's the ultimate goal but if your computer doesn't support power delivery over usb type c then you will not be able to charge your computer over usb type c even if the docking station advertises that it has that ability and here we run into the same issue that i mentioned earlier about standardization when i was talking about hdmi and displayport some computers actually will have a designation or icon next to a usb type-c port that supports power delivery not all computers do so again you might not have a designation on any of your usb type-c ports it doesn't mean that you can't charge your computer over usb type-c it might mean that but it also might mean that your manufacturer just didn't bother to put an icon next to it i mean think about it when it comes to usb 3.0 a lot of people will say look for the blue usb port while some manufacturers color that port black as well i mean it seems like computer manufacturers can't be bothered to standardize anything which again is our problem however there's another potential challenge that you might face even if your computer supports power delivery and your doc supports power delivery if you attach a power cable to the dock that provides less power and watts than your computer actually needs in order to stay charged it may not actually offer much benefit in addition even if you attach a charger that supplies the appropriate wattage and power the docking station itself might not be able to handle that same number of watts which means the docking station might be sending less power to your laptop than what the charger itself is providing so in that case you have to make sure that the docking station you're thinking of purchasing supports the wattage that's required to charge your computer and that's why you can have a docking station that's made for a 13-inch macbook pro that can keep it charged no problem but that same dock might not be able to charge a 15-inch macbook pro that has a power hungry gpu in that situation you might actually notice that your battery is draining even though your computer supports power delivery and if that's the case then you're still going to need to attach a charger or buy a docking station that actually supplies the amount of power that you need to keep your computer charged sometimes you might actually have a laptop that supports power delivery but no docking station seemingly supports the amount of power that's needed to keep it charged a good example of this is my thinkpad x1 extreme which is the laptop that i use for the majority of the videos especially when i'm doing reviews of linux distributions and the thing is none of the standard usbc docs that i've been able to find supply enough power to keep that computer charged there is however a docking station created by lenovo themselves that will power the device over usb-c it's actually a thunderbolt dock but the only reason why that works is because it provides more power than any other dock for the most part and that's not common and also the lenovo thunderbolt 3 dock is extremely expensive so in summary if you want to take advantage of power delivery the following must be the case the notebook itself must be able to accept power via usbc the docking station must also support power delivery the charger that you connect to the docking station must provide the same amount of watts that's required to charge the computer or grader also the docking station itself must support sending the amount of watts that's required to charge the computer generally speaking if you attach the usb-c charger that came with your notebook to the dock then the charger part is taken care of at that point you only need to find out if the dock itself can pass through the same amount of power in watts that the computer needs in order to charge now the thing is even if your computer doesn't support power delivery over usbc it's not the end of the world if your computer supports display over usb type c you can still use a dock you just won't be able to charge your computer over usb type c which is okay worst case scenario that means you have to connect one more cable in addition to your docking station which honestly you know isn't as convenient but it's still okay it's doable it's not the end of the world you can get around that if you have to plug in two cables i think you could probably get by but again check the spec sheet for your computer to find out if it supports power delivery over usb type-c that's important now another feature that i want to talk about is ethernet ethernet is something that some docking stations actually have it might not be as common but some of them do have an ethernet jack and if they do then if that works for you you can actually connect an ethernet cable and bypass wi-fi which is always good to do because let's be honest wired ethernet is always better than wi-fi now the beauty of this is that an ethernet jack on a usb type c dock is essentially the same thing as buying a usb 3.0 ethernet adapter so it should work for pretty much all of you it's just that there might be some variants from one dock to another you might not get 100 gigabit speeds depending on how the dock is manufactured the you know the speed of your usb port and things like that but it should be better than wi-fi so i guess it's better than nothing and if nothing else this is simple if it has an ethernet jack on it it should actually work there should be no problem getting that to work at all which is great because as i've discussed other features around docking stations well they're not that easy now let's talk about thunderbolt here we are with another concept that needs more standards the thing is everything i mentioned is a standard so you could argue that there's plenty of standards there's too many standards but there's really no standard like i mentioned when it comes to whether or not your computer is going to signify the features of your usb type-c ports because thunderbolt is actually carried over usb type-c as well and simply having a usb-c port does not mean you have thunderbolt thunderbolt determines how fast data can be transferred over that port and it essentially gives you a direct connection potentially to the pcie port of your computer or the pcie bus which means well you can get some major speeds off a thunderbolt but if you don't have thunderbolt well you can't benefit from that at all and this has really nothing to do with docking stations in general because you could buy a thunderbolt hard disk for example an external hard disk and that's great you could potentially benefit from the extra speeds but you know that's a hard drive we're talking about docking stations here if you have a thunderbolt dock then you can get some additional benefits which include the possibility of having an external gpu and that's awesome because just think about it you could have a notebook that has no gpu at all basically an integrated gpu that can't handle high-end games and then attach a thunderbolt gpu dock to your computer and then you can play those games essentially turning your non-gaming computer into a gaming computer i mean how awesome would that be but now we run into some other issues here because again if your computer doesn't actually have thunderbolt on any of the usb type-c ports you can't really use a gpu dock at all which sucks but what's worse is that you could have thunderbolt and you still might not be able to use a gpu dock because there's different versions of thunderbolt two three and four for example each supporting different speeds so you could have a thunderbolt port that's on the slower side which means your gpu well your external gpu is not really going to benefit you all that much now you have to understand what type of thunderbolt you have if any on your computer and you also have to understand how many lanes it has as well so however many lanes you have determines how fast data can transfer over usb type c via thunderbolt so just keep that in mind and that's a whole nother video of them by itself because there's other complications here that you have to keep in mind i might actually make another video about gpu docs in general if you guys want me to because i think again that is probably a new video of and by itself that being said if you do have thunderbolt on your computer and it's fast enough with the correct number of lanes you could actually use a gpu dock and they're not marketed as docking stations they're marketed as you know external gpus but they do actually have you know docking stations that are advertised as gpu docs that have the gpu integrated while we also have external gpu enclosures that you could purchase to actually fit a desktop gpu inside and that's pretty much going to transform your non-gaming computer if compatible into a gaming computer which is great you'll always have slower speeds than when you connect that same gpu into an actual desktop so there's going to be a little bit of a bandwidth limit there but it's still pretty cool [Music] but anyway at this point you should have all the basic understanding that you need when it comes to the fundamentals of docking stations and the features and what's required to make them work so at this point what i'd like to do is talk about a few different docking stations that i've used that i've had success with my number one favorite docking station of all is the pine dock and by pine i mean the same company that made the pine book pine thyme pine phone they even have a soldering iron believe it or not they make a lot of different things but their docking station is great in fact i reviewed it not that long ago so check out that video if you want to learn more about that dock but overall i think it's the best and some of the reasons why i like it so much is because it has an insane number of ports basically everything you could ever want and it doesn't seem to generate that much heat it's very common for these usbc docking stations to run extremely hot sometimes to the point where it's uncomfortable to even touch them even though a lot of these docking stations are rated to run that hot i still don't like it the pine dock in my experience doesn't run hot at all also the pine dock supports power delivery so it's able to charge your computer if your computer is able to receive power from usbc so if you want to power your computer then that box is checked the only reason why i don't use it on a daily basis is because i have an ultra wide display with a 5k resolution and it's really hard to find a docking station that's going to work with a resolution like that but as long as you don't have a crazy resolution the pine dock is a great choice another docking station that i like is the kingston nucleum it doesn't have as many ports as the pine dock has but it does have two usbc ports one of which supports power delivery it has two usb type-a ports that supports usb 3 transfer speeds has a built-in card reader and also an hdmi port the only thing i don't like about it is that it doesn't have a built-in ethernet jack but if that isn't something that matters to you then the kingston nucleum is actually a good choice i mentioned the thunderbolt 3 dock by lenovo earlier and i'm going to mention it again right now the thing is like i mentioned before the thunderbolt 3 dock is outrageously expensive if you have a laptop like the thinkpad x1 extreme that's very power hungry then your choice of docking stations is going to be fairly limited because not that many of them can provide the power that's required to charge a laptop that uses a lot of energy this one actually does supply enough power to the thinkpad x1 extreme keeping it charged and allowing me to use it as a desktop and that's pretty cool but you can actually use the thunderbolt 3 dock with other computers as well you don't have to have a lenovo computer i was able to use it with system 76 machines i tried it with a macbook and it worked on all of them so if you can afford it the thunderbolt 3 dock by lenovo is actually a good choice and if you have a power hungry laptop it might be your only choice but even if you were to buy one used the price is still a little bit up there the cost can range anywhere from 150 us dollars to over 200 so it's definitely an investment so i know that was a lot of information to go over in one video but i wanted to make sure that you guys had all the knowledge that you need to make an informed decision if you're in the market for a docking station if nothing else i'll have a video that i can refer people back to because i get a lot of questions when i review laptops about which docking station is compatible and it's my hope that this video will be helpful in pointing you in the right direction anyway thank you so much for watching subscribe if you haven't already done so and i'll see you in the next video [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 9,841

Keywords: Linux, Tutorial, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, os, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, LearnLinux.tv, usb, usb docking stations, usb type c, usb-c, usb dock, power delivery, thunderbolt, docking station, replicator, port replicator, laptop docking station, how to, usb c, thunderbolt 3, docking stations for laptops, laptop dock station, dock station, display, external monitor, hdmi, hub, usb c vs thunderbolt 3, usb c docking station

Id: bTfGy0lPPFA

Length: 27min 28sec (1648 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MightyDillah]

This guy is a legit linux expert, while not a hardware expert: he went deep on usb-c docks. I found this video very helpful. Docks shouldn't be this complicated, but here we are.