Sometimes when I dock the Librem 5 the docking does not occur. The screen on the dock object will show the L5 desktop background but the mouse, keyboard, and display do not work.
Is there a way to force docking to occur such that it shows the icon in quick settings.
I really hate having to reboot the L5 so I’m hoping there is a solution.
I assume that you only get a picture on your external display, but the usb peripherals do not work?
You’ll not get docked mode if you only connect a monitor even though the external screen is working - just tested it on my L5. Even if I then connect a bluetooth keyboard docked mode is not entered and the on-screen keyboard is still shown when keyboard entries are expected (this I’d consider an issue).
You should have a look at the output of sudo lsusb and journalctl -b and compare the information about usb devices between an occasion when the docking happened as expected and one where it didn’t work.
Forcing the docked mode somehow will probably not help to make your usb devices work. If you’d connect your usb keyboard or usb mouse without connecting to an external monitor your L5 wouldn’t enter docked mode neither, but your peripherals would work well (and you’d be annoyed by the fact that the on-screen keyboard shows up even though you’re typing on an external keyboard 
)
I find docking is smoothest when I plug in the dock without power, then add power to the dock. I don’t know why I have to do this, but hopefully it improves somehow.
seems like you should make sure you undock BEFORE you let the phone suspend as well. It doesn’t seem to like waking after it was docked and suspended.
Update the u-boot to prevent malfuntions in Dock and PD?HDMI.