I have an old monitor which only supports DVI and when I work from home, I connect my notebook to it using an HDMI to DVI adapter. This approach, which has never caused a problem with any of my notebooks, has never worked when trying to connect a Raspberry Pi to it.
Most of the time I use the Raspberry from the command line, and so it has never bothered me … too much. Today I found the answer in some obscure forum while looking for something else.
It turned out to be an easy fix: In the file /boot/config.txt, I just needed to add or uncomment the line:
hdmi_force_hotplug=1Voilà, Raspberry Pi desktop on my old DVI monitor.