The irony here is that, to me at least, someone that is comfortable being themself is generally much more attractive than someone trying to look good for the sake of looking good.

Does it work if you unplug and replug?

In general, yes.

If you hit a button other than power does it wake up, or does it say “no signal” or something?

Yes.

Does the laptop see it?

I’m assuming not as it does not display on it. Next time it happens I’ll see what xrandr says.

Anything in any log?

Nothing in Xorg.0.log and nothing that seems related in the journal. I’ll keep journalctl --follow running and see if anything that I didn’t pick as being related comes up next time it happens.

Can you force a redetection from the laptop?

Probably, but I don’t know how.

1. If you use the same USB port for this all the time, disable power saving on that port

I use the same port all the time. I want power saving on the port. I like to just get up from my PC and have it go to sleep by itself and wake back up when I come and jiggle the mouse. It’s working exactly as I would like maybe 90% of the time. Just sometimes the external monitor doesn’t wake up.

2. Make sure this isn’t a PD port (this is a laptop design annoyance)

It is a PD port, and it is powering the laptop. I’m not sure why this would be a problem? It’s worked fine for 5-6 years with Windows and works 90% of the time now with Linux.

3. Make sure your monitor’s own power saving settings aren’t the issue by disabling things like “deep sleep” or similar

Again, I’m not sure how this could be a problem for the scenario I describe. The settings work fine 90% of the time. It’s not even time related: sometimes I can come to it first thing in the morning, after it’s been asleep all night, and it wakes perfectly; sometimes I can get up to go get a glass of water and come back and the external monitor won’t wake up. It seems totally random.

I’m not a server admin., just a user. The Lemmy instance I’m on setup a Piefed instance in parallel and is giving users the option to use either, or both. I’m still trying to get my head around the history and the pros/cons of each but for now it seems like I’m switching to Piefed. I imagine that if most users move then the Lemmy instance might get shutdown in the future.