Second Monitor not detected by Debian settings, is detected by NVidia settings

The problem

I have installed Debian (Debian 5.10.162-1 (2023-01-21) x86_64 GNU/Linux) on my Omen 15 laptop (15-en0xxx).

Currently I have secure boot disabled in my UEFI to make sure this is not related to unsigned software issues.

When I plugin my external monitor (either through HDMI or through my thunderbolt-to-DVI adapter, Debian fails to detect the secondary screen and nothing is displayed on the secondary display.

The monitor is visible in the nvidia-settings utility under GPU 0 - (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti). It appears as DP-1-3 - (HP E221c) and disappears when I unplug the monitor. It correctly reappears when I replug the monitor. Nothing is however displayed on the monitor at any point during this process. The Debian settings app does not list the monitor at all under dispay settings.

My laptop configuration is as follows:

KERNEL : 5.10.0-21-amd64

CPU : AMD Ryzen 5 4600H with Radeon Graphics (12) @ 3.000GHz

GPU : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Mobile

I have browsed the forums before, but I have not found a solution to my problem yet (being able to use the external monitor as a secondary display).

System setup information

All commands below are executed with the second monitor connected to the laptop

Output for xrandr:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384
eDP connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm
   1920x1080    144.00*+  60.00  
   1680x1050    144.00  
   1280x1024    144.00  
   1440x900     144.00  
   1280x800     144.00  
   1280x720     144.00  
   1024x768     144.00  
   800x600      144.00  
   640x480      144.00 

Output for xrandr --listproviders

Providers: number : 2
Provider 0: id: 0x54 cap: 0xf, Source Output, Sink Output, Source Offload, Sink Offload crtcs: 4 outputs: 1 associated providers: 0 name:Unknown AMD Radeon GPU @ pci:0000:06:00.0
Provider 1: id: 0x1f7 cap: 0x2, Sink Output crtcs: 4 outputs: 5 associated providers: 0 name:NVIDIA-G0

Output for xrandr --listmonitors

Monitors: 1
 0: +*eDP 1920/344x1080/194+0+0  eDP

Output for inxi -G

Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA TU116M [GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Mobile] driver: nvidia 
  v: 470.161.03 
  Device-2: AMD Renoir driver: amdgpu v: kernel 
  Device-3: Luxvisions Innotech Limited HP Wide Vision HD Camera type: USB 
  driver: uvcvideo 
  Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: loaded: amdgpu,ati,nvidia 
  unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,nouveau,vesa resolution: 1920x1080~144Hz 
  OpenGL: renderer: AMD RENOIR (DRM 3.40.0 5.10.0-21-amd64 LLVM 11.0.1) 
  v: 4.6 Mesa 20.3.5

Output for sudo lshw -c video

  *-display                 
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: TU116M [GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Mobile]
       vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
       version: a1
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
       configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0
       resources: irq:102 memory:fb000000-fbffffff memory:b0000000-bfffffff memory:c0000000-c1ffffff ioport:f000(size=128) memory:fc000000-fc07ffff
  *-display
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Renoir
       vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:06:00.0
       version: c7
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm pciexpress msi msix vga_controller bus_master cap_list
       configuration: driver=amdgpu latency=0
       resources: irq:51 memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:e0000000-e01fffff ioport:d000(size=256) memory:fc500000-fc57ffff

Output for lsmod | grep nvidia

nvidia_drm             73728  2
nvidia_modeset       1204224  4 nvidia_drm
nvidia              35516416  107 nvidia_modeset
drm_kms_helper        278528  2 amdgpu,nvidia_drm
drm                   626688  13 gpu_sched,drm_kms_helper,nvidia,amdgpu,nvidia_drm,ttm

What I have tried

I’ve ran nvidia-xconfig and rebooted. This resulted in the external monitor functioning as expected, but the built-in monitor of my laptop only displayed a black prompt with a static cursor at the left top corner. This did not solve my problem.

Removing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and rebooting restores my laptops internal screens functionallity but now the external monitor is again not detected and nothing is displayed.

My laptops BIOS/UEFI does not have a toggle for enything related to “dedicated” or “discrete” graphics, or anything related to graphics at all for that matter.

Can somebody please guide me to get my external monitor to get detected and working? The nvidia-xconfig seemed to get close leading me to believe it is just a matter of finding the correct configuration / module.

Extra command output can be provided if any information is missing here.

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