I’ve been using a software solution for this for over a decade. It’s called Synergy (https://symless.com/synergy) and it is fast - switches instantly over wifi and also works across Windows/Mac/Linux.
I wish any solution had custom monitor interleaving. My personal setup is such that the monitors are not set up linearly, and each monitor can independently switch to each machine. Specifying the boundaries on a per-monitor and per-machine basis would be amazing, but it doesn't seem to exist in software or hardware form.
I spoke to Synergy recently and they said it is on the road map as a popular feature request. Hopefully soon!
The product is sometimes called a boundless, borderless, or roaming KM switch.
https://www.cdw.com/product/siig-4-port-roaming-km-switch-wi...
The only downside is that you have to "renew maintenance" to continue receiving updates to ShareMouse after a year. But I haven't done that yet and it still works fine for me.
Even if it's not true, I feel like I'm going to be nickel+dimed or hit with mysterious and surprising fees.
As someone who creates software, I want to comply with the licensing out of principle and respect/admiration for creators. It shouldn't be so difficult to understand what it would cost me.
Opaque pricing is an immediate "no thanks" for me. I honestly don't care how good an app is; if it's not easy to buy, I'm not going to buy it.
I’m not affiliated with the maker in any way but if anyone’s curious I can go look up which one I have. It was just a random Chinese thing under ~$45 or so.
I'd love to have a more sophisticated device that switches in under a second.
Hdmi is also slightly glitchy. All in all, it's a slight improvement but not what I'm looking for.
My Amazon cheap DP KVM is fast enough for me when switching, my guess is somewhere in the 0.75-2 second range, I'll have to time it for you. I'll reply again with the results.
*Note: i mean for monitors, i'm aware that i'm not gonna avoid it in the living room :)
Technies almost always have a laptop, phone, and home desktop up at once, often have some media/fileshare, and then there are VMs to further the complexity.
Here's what I've been wanting for years: a big ass 8k wraparound monitor, and it has clickable widgets in the desktop to turn on the computer/VM and activate the display feed into some part of the desktop.
There's a primary desktop area, and that area is surrounded by "neutral zones/buffer zones where if you take the mouse into that area and click on it, it would swap the "primary" area to that machine and place the former machine's display into one of the peripheral areas of the large display, or secondary monitors.
With "cores to spare" in modern Moore's law scaling, I should be able to have several OSes seamlessly running at once, not the virtualbox stuff or other clunkiness, a much more seamless experience. There's a lot of hardware/CPU features to support it, but of course the OS vendors/distros have no prioritization to do something like that. It's also a fundamental failing of IoT.
We are all moving towards a world where we have a dozen decent-class computing devices (Multicore multiGhz phone, 2x that for a tablet, 2x that for a laptop, and 2x that for a desktop) even not counting IoT, media, etc.
We need a truly distributed OS that can handle this stuff. Windows/Android/iOS/OSX won't do it, they are in the walled garden business we need Linux to do it. The cloud projects, k8s / etc wanted a "datacenter OS" but basically failed.
No. The hardware features that allow running multiple OS's at once is what VirtualBox/QEMU/HyperV/Xen/etc. use, and those feature require a privileged OS to manage it.
The hardware does not support having multiple OS's manage the machine at once - even if they could be made to run, they'd step on each other and make hardware crash as they all try to configure it differently at the same time, and with them all in ring 0 they'd be able to arbitrarily compromise each other. Plus, you'd be annoyed that each of, say, 3 OS's could only use 1/3rd of all resources - 16 cores and 64 GB of RAM may seem like lot, but 5 cores and 21 GB of RAM does not.
It's a dumb idea. Just get a better OS, a better hypervisor, better "fastboot to other OS" features (say, 1-5 seconds "hibernate and resume other OS"), or another desktop.
What definition are you using here? I like tech and worked as a software engineer (not working now), and I haven't owned a desktop in over a decade. If we're talking "almost always", I think these days I have 0 phones/laptops up most of the time followed by 1 in pretty close second place, and even having 2 (let alone 3 or more) is uncommon for me.
Also, havent heard Full Sail in a really long time... Had a friend from growing up that went there and became famous...
THanks for the link - Ill be installing this around my place today :-)
https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap
Keep an eye on that for anything new
Synergy doesn't work on Wayland, so I can't use it on Fedora anymore (unless I switch it back to X).
There's always new feature requests. Drag and Drop files is a common one. I personally think that's scope creep, but I can see the appeal. Synergy and barrier already establish an encrypted connection between machines, so copying a file seems a good fit. At very least a "Synergy send to ${computer}" share/send to option would make sense.
Here's Synergy's roadmap, and since Synergy and Barrier are the commercial/open-source fork of the same ancestor, Barrier probably has received similiar requests over time.