I gave that a try as well, but in my experience it didn't improve the situation much.
After giving it some thought I suspect that it may or may not be related to Thunderbolt settings in UEFI that refer to enabling Thunderbolt support in the pre-boot environment. I'll make sure to update the post if I discover anything new regarding this.
I agree - I think the problem is mostly the dock: I have a Dell Precision and a similar dock - TB16 - at the office and a Cable Matters dock at home (with a similar peripheral setup), and the CM never gave me any trouble while the TB16 always have issues with one of the external displays not connecting (sometimes one, sometimes the other), the USB hub taking ages to init and then sometimes disconnecting in the middle of the day, and other stuff. Hard reseting the dock (disconnect power and TB cables and reconnect) sometimes helps, but not always. Also Google "tb16 xhci disconnects" for more issues and workarounds.
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Note to the author or anyone else having similar problems with a Thunderbolt/USB-C dock on a Dell running Linux:
Try hard-resetting the dock. (Just yank the power and put it back in.)
Hi, author here.
I gave that a try as well, but in my experience it didn't improve the situation much.
After giving it some thought I suspect that it may or may not be related to Thunderbolt settings in UEFI that refer to enabling Thunderbolt support in the pre-boot environment. I'll make sure to update the post if I discover anything new regarding this.
I agree - I think the problem is mostly the dock: I have a Dell Precision and a similar dock - TB16 - at the office and a Cable Matters dock at home (with a similar peripheral setup), and the CM never gave me any trouble while the TB16 always have issues with one of the external displays not connecting (sometimes one, sometimes the other), the USB hub taking ages to init and then sometimes disconnecting in the middle of the day, and other stuff. Hard reseting the dock (disconnect power and TB cables and reconnect) sometimes helps, but not always. Also Google "tb16 xhci disconnects" for more issues and workarounds.