For this USB-C has been a godsend. With one cable I get power, monitor, mouse, keyboard, webcam, and audio. Super easy to switch between laptop and desktop while using same peripherals. I don't miss the dongles a bit.

Did you have to do a lot of shopping around to make this work? Or is it pretty reliable / common across the OEMs?

I’ve been using a desktop 99.99% of the time for several years, so I’m a bit out of touch with laptop offerings.

You'll need to do shopping.

You have to confirm that (A) laptop USB-C does PD (power delivery) and DP (DisplayPort); (B) your monitor has USB-C and can deliver enough power (60-100W I guess is enough); (C) the USB-C cable is 3.1 gen2 with 10Gbps rating.

Then you'll need enough USB plugs for your peripherals. I added a hub to the backside of my monitor, works without issues even though the chain is now laptop-monitor-hub-device.

Switching between laptop and desktop is also another consideration. I have desktop with DisplayPort cable + USB-C 3.0 for peripherals. Then I got a short USB-C male-female extension (3.1 gen2) so I can switch laptop/desktop cables without wearing out the monitor USB-C port.

So yes some dabbling required.

It's a mess, a manageable mess, but a mess.

I have a 34" LG ultrawide USB-C display that just works with my private and work Macbooks, no issues at all. I also have a non-USB-C monitor with a 40-ish Euros USB-C hub (brand name is Uni I think, no idea what model, it's a relatively small one with ethernet) that works like a charm. In my laptop bag I have a smaller power/1 USB/1 HDMI adapter from the same brand (because it was relatively cheap), a USB-C extension cord, and short USB-C to Micro USB and USB-C to Lightning cables and a small USB-A-USB-C adapter – sounds like a lot but packs very flat and neat into a small pocket, and so far it's been enough for my needs.

I bought another hub for about 100 Euros that should support multiple screens but doesn't really, and it swallows DDC commands, meaning I can't use MonitorControl to control my external screen's brightness – not happy with that one at all, but I believe this is an outlier, it was an early Gen2 device that says it can drive more screens than its bandwidth can possibly allow for.

I've tried and used a couple others as well. So far, this is what I've learned:

- Look for power delivery with sufficient watts (60W for my 13" Macbook Pro) – this is sometimes buried in the description and it sucks when your laptop won't charge under load.

- Look for 4k at 60hz, even if you don't have a 4k screen (yet) — lots only do 30hz, which means 5gbit/s USB 3.1 Gen1, which is the same bandwidth as the old USB 3.0, which may lead to issues with larger screens (starting way below 4k) and fast periphery. 4k at 60hz seems like the best indicator for USB 3.1 Gen2, which is 10gbit/s, which has more headroom. This is sometimes buried deep in the product description, and I may have some of this wrong, the baker's dozen of USB-C standards is a real mess.

- Don't rely on plugging USB-C devices into a USB-C hub; try to do with USB 2.0/3.0 ports. Many hubs offer one USB-C data port, but I've yet to see one that isn't very, very temperamental. I've briefly used a pretty pricey Lenovo hub where this caused the hub to just freeze randomly, regardless of what I plugged into that port. Power delivery nowadays works fine though, as long as the supported wattage is large enough.

The ecosystem seems to have matured quite a bit over the last few years; the first hub I've used at work was barely functioning, with power delivery mostly a joke and HDMI kinda sketchy, nowadays I guess you'll be fine if you buy a 30W/60W/100W (whatever you need), 4k@60hz single HDMI one.

No idea how to get multiple screens off a single USB-C cable to work, though. I hear it's relatively easy on Windows, kinda difficult on macOS and a major engineering challenge on Linux.

YMMV but I personally separate adapters into dongles (one input, one output) and hubs (N inputs, one output). There's also docks, but those are just stationary hubs.