I have a 15-inch Macbook Pro i7, purchased in July 2013. I'm running 10.8.5 and I want to upgrade to Mavericks. I did some searches a few months ago and it looked like there was a high chance of failure for my DisplayLink monitors. I have a 24" running in portrait mode on the thunderbolt port, and a USB hub with two 24" monitors on DisplayLink adapters: one portrait, one landscape. After all the reading, I am not very confident my system will work. Especially having more than one DisplayLink monitor. I've been patiently waiting, but no fixes announced. Anyone care to guess at my chances of success upgrading to Mavericks? ... will my DL monitors keep working? I don't really look forward to spending hours reloading Snow Leopard if they don't. Better yet, is there any pattern to the trouble? Are certain machines, like newer ones or those with certain video cards, more likely to succeed at upgrading to Mavericks? I have two DL monitors and they work great on 10.8.5.
So, is there a way to predict which Macs or DisplayLink adapters will have trouble on Mavericks? The Wiki says it's the OS X desktop server that causes the problems by crashing, right? Is it crashing because of resource shortage, or conflicts, or something else? ... It has been months now since Mavericks came out. I don't want to waste a day upgrading to Mavericks, troubleshooting, and reloading Snow Leopard ..... One of the big benefits of Mavericks was supposed to be the multi-monitor support, and DisplayLink is one of the popular solutions for multiple monitors. ... It's oddly ironic.
I quickly tried displaylink on a macbook with Mavericks and restored Mountain Lion -- you can expect not only slow framerates, but also ghost windows that don't render their contents, and show only their spooky shadowy outlines. I'm still miffed re Apple's sluggishness to fix their API this time around. I could really use Maverick's new scheduling coalescence ...
I can add two thunderbolt monitors (maybe even three, not sure) if I just buy new Thunderbolt displays at Apple's preposterous prices. Then I can upgrade to Mavericks. I guess I need to look for some sort of Thunderbolt hub, or Thunderbolt passthrough device, so I can use my three DVI monitors. Ugh! When is this going to get fixed? I'm three months late to the Mavericks party because of my multiple monitors, and one of the things about Mavericks was the multiple monitor support! Thanks for the feedback EddieMa and Melia.