MacOS black screen after sleep

Yesterday I decided it was time to upgrade my MacBook Pro 2018 from Mojave to Catalina. Easy update but in the future if someone tells you Windows 10 upgrades are slow, ask them to try it on a Mac. I can update all Windows devices in my house one by one faster than my Mac from 10.14 to 10.15.

Anyhow, this was not a post to beat down my Mac, I do still like parts of you 😀

After the installation was done all was well with my applications, homebrew kept working and everything appeared to be just fine. Until this morning, like most mornings I pulled my Mac and opened the lid waiting for the screen to light up, but no. Touchbar (the worst idea ever by the way) was active but the screen was black. After my first meetings of the day it was time to test if this still happened. And yes, it did.

Some digging on the web and someone even had a fix to re-install the operating system… What the … I’m not going to re-install. Haven’t reinstalled any of my other computers either and hopefully the Mac is not this unstable that you have to re-install just for an upgrade when the Windows installations are fine after years and years of upgrades and Linux installations even more so.

The one common thing I found was that most fixes were deleting .kext files, kernel extensions. Some even mentioned the specific files to delete, I however did not have any of them but what I did have on my Mac was the DisplayLink software as I use it with my Lenovo USB-C docking station. All is fair in war and computer issues so:

Go to your applications folder and look up DisplayLink, then run the Uninstaller.

It will ask you to reboot so you should, once done go find the latest driver from Displaylink.com. Install it, reboot and your black screen should be gone. This of-course assumes you had DisplayLink installed in the first place :D.

As always the writing here is mostly notes for myself. If you had success with the above, enjoy and you are welcome.