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Comment by jjp | Hacker News Reader

It's solving a problem I currently have but am using VNC to solve. Are there differentiations vs screen sharing in that way. Appreciate that it could be usability and market positioning to mean that I'm not the target audience, but is there some other functionality I've not seen in the demo video? And yes my Mac Mini is currently headless with no display (using the paperclip hack to improve performance) or keyboard.

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I'm using Display Menu on the headless Mac Mini that holds my ripped CDs and DVDs. Seems to work great with Screen Sharing from my other Macs.

I've been very happy with how it works. I've gone from a 2007 to a 2012 to a 2018 Mac Mini using it. There are times, almost only when I'm upgrading to the new computer, that I have to break out the physical connector and use an external display.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/display-menu/id549083868?mt=12

How is the performance with VNC? Can you watch fullscreen YouTube videos and is there any noticeable lag when typing / in the ui?

Tempted to switch my main machine over to Linux but still want access to OSX.

If you have two displays you could use something like Synergy to accomplish what you want. I use it both at work and at home. I work for two companies under the same owner, and I do all my IT related support work on one PC and my other duties on the other. I have two screens side by side, and one keyboard/mouse connected to the machine I use the most. It's set up as the KM server under Synergy. I just drag my pointer to the right edge of my left display and it seamlessly transitions to controlling the computer hooked up to the right display.

At home I have a Slackware workstation, a Windows gaming machine, and a Mac mini, each with a dedicated display. Again, I can drag my mouse pointer to the left or right edge to access either of the screens/PCs left or right of my main display.

There is an open source fork called Barrier as well.

I'm not using VNC to Mac Mini enough for me to give meaningful feedback on typing lag. I'm currently mostly running it headless media server and local web server, so occasional remote. However with children requiring access to more devices for longer I'm looking at ways to solve shorter term need without having to go out and buy new hardware.

do you have a pointer to the paperclip hack? difficult to google for

http://web.archive.org/web/20160513142051/https://macminicol...

http://web.archive.org/web/20200512113040/http://www.mactalk...

Resistor hack?

Seems like if it’s not loading the driver then it should be possible to just load it with kextload? No? I can’t imagine that it’s not a module if it gets activated later, but obviously I could be wrong. I’m not a MacOS kernel hacker.

I guess that would be easy to check by running kextstat before and after plugging in the DisplayPort.

Sadly I only have a 2013 Mac Pro (which has AMD graphics only) so it will operate differently. :/

Probably this https://soledadpenades.com/posts/2009/mac-mini-as-a-headless...

But it is a resistor.

You can just buy a dongle online that does this. It’s an HDMI dongle that tells the OS that you have a monitor plugged in when you don’t. There is a way to make the adapter yourself (paperclip hack), but using an actual adapter has the advantage is it can support higher resolutions that you can then export over VNC.

I’m using this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CXX7QL5 (non-affiliate link) which supports 4K@60 resolutions.

Paperclip hack is the resistor hack that others in the reply have linked to. My paperclip has been in situ for a few years so don't have the original source, but one of the resistor hack how to postings suggested that there was enough resistance in a paperclip and had a spare display adapter kicking around so tried it and it worked for me. Laggy performance on headless Mini ended.

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