[beokop]

I haven’t thought of it this way before but I think you’re right. External monitor support does break randomly and hardware support through dongles is extremely flakey.

A small excerpt from my personal list of woes:

- Using a USB-c <-> DVI cable gives the monitor a purple hue. An HDMI cable does not. Also, this isn’t an issue in bootcamp.

- Can’t use the serial debugger of a Particle Photon because it can’t use the dongle’s USB-A interface directly.

- Sometimes the Touch Bar goes completely unresponsive for ~10s. Sometimes, after a reboot or after waking from sleep, it just doesn’t start at all.

- At one point the speakers started blasting white noise at the loudest volume for no apparent reason. Closed the lid, opened it, same thing. Rebooted the machine and never encountered that problem again.

- If a certain kind of network error occurs when setting up Time Machine then System Preferences will hang completely for ~5 minutes.

In many ways the experience is what I would expect if I could run Linux on this machine: Hardware kind of works with lots of random bugs.

[mjlee]

For your first problem, perhaps some monitor auto detection has gone crazy with a colour profile. Have a look under System Preferences -> Displays -> Colour (you need to have the monitor plugged in to tweak it.)

[beokop]

Thanks for the tip. I’ve tried that before, without success, but someone else reading this might have better luck.

For what it’s worth this happens both with a 15” and a 13” MBP from different years.

[mjlee]

Maybe one of the pins in the DVI connector is dodgy? Have you tried another connector/DVI cable/DVI source to rule out the display? I know you said it didn't happen in bootcamp but perhaps there's some deep magic happening.