Mac with 3 monitors - Dock died when waking up from sleep

[ringgit]

1. I have a Mac mini M2 connected to an LG via USB-C, a Dell (landscape) via HDMI and another Dell in portrait mode via a USB-C dongle to HDMI. I am using Ventura.

2. I used Alfred and issue a "sleep display" to turn off the monitors. The Mac is set to never sleep even if display is off.

3. When I press space bar to wake up and login to the Mac, quite often I find a big black box at the background, the Dock is gone.

4. If I do an Expose, it kinda works and yet I can't click any apps

5. If I have Spaces, e.g. Desktop 1, Desktop 2, Desktop 3, I noticed that they are sometimes renamed as Desktop 18, Desktop 19, Desktop 20.

6. I have to killall dock to restore the Dock.

7. Or, sometimes I have to click Apple logo and click Sleep, then immediately wake it. This seems to refresh the system and all is working fine.

Anyone seen this weird behavior?

 

[ringgit]

I did an experiment. I took off one monitor i.e. Mac is running with two monitors. When I wake up from sleep, sometimes, I do get that distorted wallpaper (with a big, black rectangle) and many Spaces named as Desktop 18,19, onwards. I further detached one more monitor, that is, I am only running one main ultra wide. The same issue happened. I am not sure if it was the ultra wide compatibility or, it was Ventura that is causing this. What an annoyance. For the record, I used to sleep using Alfred but for this experiment, I sleep using MacOS keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Shift-Eject). It doesn't matter. The problem persist.

 

[belfong]

[OS X Desktop backgrounds gray after waking from sleep - CNET](https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/os-x-desktop-backgrounds-gray-after-waking-from-sleep/)

Wednesday, 14 February 2024, 11:24 AM
> It appears that this occurrence is a problem with the management of multiple monitors and desktops, which in OS X is the responsibility of the Dock. When this problem happens, you can usually correct it by using Activity Monitor to force the Dock to quit and relaunch, which reloads the desktop and monitor setup configuration and properly displays the Dock.


(Sounds like the same symptom you are seeing the funny thing is that this article was written about OS X Lion, 12 years ago! How is this not solved??)