Thunderbolt dock weirdness

dignan17 · December 23, 2025

Hello! I hope I'm putting this in the right spot. Apologies if not.

I have the following, extremely basic setup:

Framework 13 laptop (I'm not entirely positive which version, but it's getting pretty old now)

UGreen thunderbolt dock (I don't mean to shill for Amazon, but this is what I got)

Monoprice 4K monitor (no idea how to find the model number - even Monoprice doesn't seem to want to admit they ever sold this thing)

The dock is connected to a rear port on the Framework. I believe I heard that I have to use those for Thunderbolt 4. The monitor is connected to the dock via displayport.

Now for the weirdness: most of the time, everything is totally fine. I'm typing this up in Chrome, using the very setup I just described along with a bluetooth keyboard. I'm able to use pretty much all my applications with no problem.

But if I go to the desktop, the screen goes black.

It's so weird. As soon as I minimize the last window, or use the bottom-right button in the taskbar (I'm on Windows 11) to minimize everything, the screen goes black. And it's not just a visual glitch. The monitor shows the input at the top right, like it's not receiving signal. Every once and a while, it'll flash the desktop again, but then go right back to a black screen.

This has happened occasionally in other apps, but not nearly as often. I believe it might have happened every once and a while in OpenSCAD and perhaps once or twice in Bambu Studio. Nothing else that I can think of. But the desktop ALWAYS makes it do this. I usually get out of it by alt-tabbing into any open application.

Any ideas what's happening here? I've never seen anything like this...