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Comment by ddalex | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that you have to have a monitor plugged in the windows card otherwise it goes all wonky. At that point you could just use a KVM....

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KVM switches are often slow and/or buggy and/or expensive. Plus, looking glass is more flexible since you can display both OSs at the same time.

As a sibling comment stated, you can get a dummy monitor plug on Amazon for like $5 which fools your GPU into thinking there's a monitor attached.

The blurb at the top says "allows the use of a KVM [...] without an attached physical monitor, keyboard or mouse." Is that not correct?

I mean it behaves like a software KVM, at which point you can use a hardware KVM without the added latency penalty due to memory copy....

Judging from reviews of hardware keyboard-video-mouse switches, they tend to work MUCH worse than Looking Glass. All modern GPU connectors are digital, so those KVM switches have to include a mini-gpu (usually a costly and buggy one). Also they end up re-implementing a complete HID support, because otherwise switching USB devices between hubs takes forever.

In nutshell, KVMs aren't worth their money because they have to re-implementing a lot of hardware already found in your PC.

The abbreviation KVM can mean two things: Kernel-based Virtual Machine, and keyboard/video/mouse (switch). Gp was talking about the latter.

You can always use a dummy plug to fool windows into believing there is a monitor attached. Then it's much more convenient than using a KVM switch.

Not only are there dummy plugs, but some cards (e.g., Quadro) let you spoof the EDID without one at all.

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