[microcolonel]

With what laptop is this currently true?

I've never personally had this experience, and I haven't heard a sincere account of something as basic as multihead graphics being broken for years.

[rca]

It's hard to get it to work with optimus-like systems, where the external video ports are not wired to the integrated gpu, and you want to use it by default (which is something you want if you care about battery life at all). Otherwise, yeah it should work out of the box.