External Display plug-n-play in LL & other Ubuntu-based distros, revisited ...

[m654321]

[member=458]m654321[/member]
I couldn't really reproduce your problem. I first tried using a friend's quite new laptop running Ubuntu 16.04. We plugged in the HDMI cable and the display came up - albeit as an extension to the laptop display rather than as a mirror of it. Clicking a checkbox on the info box that appeared solved that and I got the impression that that could become a default setting.

I've now tried it with Linux Lite on my 2006 Philips Freevents laptop and again the display came up right away, using a VGA cable. This time it would not accept mirroring at all because of a difference in the size of displays, so I suppose that would have required some fiddling about - possibly unsuccessfully too, but that looks more like a hardware issue to me given that the laptop is 11 years old. It would still display immediately on the external monitor though if you accepted it as an extension display or alternative display (ie laptop screen blanked).
This seems OK to me., really. Are you used to seeing something better than that with the other distros?

Does the sound plug-n-play too?
When I mentioned plug-n-play, I meant sound together with video - not just video - I'm using our Samsung TV monitor to play TV programmes recorded on a laptop.