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.
Synergy, Barrier, and Input Leap are all pretty good software solutions stemming from the same ancestor. The latter two are free and open source. Synergy has a nice way of organizing the boundaries between your machines.
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!
I tried to use this for a while but it didn't work well when using different VPNs on different computers. So, I bought a commercial device similar to the DIY one here and it works amazingly well. It doesn't require you to log in to the computers first and you can switch by moving across screen edges or with a series of keystrokes. You can also switch the attached USB devices independently of the keyboard and mouse.
The product is sometimes called a boundless, borderless, or roaming KM switch.
The computers need to be able to reach each other, yes. You should be able to do that by adding a route overriding the VPN route (just like how any VPN client has to prevent the traffic to the VPN server from going through the tunnel).
No one has mentioned ShareMouse yet? (https://www.sharemouse.com/) In my experience it has worked way better than Synergy. I switched after getting fed up with the synergy developers not responding to various multi-year old bugs that made the software unworkable for me (e.g. https://github.com/symless/synergy-core/issues/5992).
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.
A few months ago my mouse stopped working on my 2nd computer. It took me a few minutes to fix because I just plain forgot I was running Synergy. I checked, and my setup had been working without issue for 4-5 years. Definitely near the top of my list for valuable paid software.
Looks awesome, but sad they put TLS as a premium feature above the basic for pay sku. Security should be default in everything and for free. It’s not a luxury, it’s a table stakes bare minimum thing. (That said I’ll try it out and if it’s good I’ll license the premium sku for the copy and paste feature)
Listing security as a premium feature, and "business use" not having pricing instead requiring a sales call are good ways to stop me from using any app.
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 bought Synergy and ended up not using it shortly, nowadays I use a cheap physical USB switch(about $20) that can work with 4 PCs sharing one set of keyboard and mouse, super robust for me, and quick too.
Amazon has a lot of cheap KVMs now. I have a DisplayPort one with 3 USB ports and my favorite part, a wired button to switch between computers! I just stuck the button to the bottom of my desk top and can switch instantly. There’s also a wireless remote I’ve never tried and a keyboard hotkey (though using its special keyboard port confused my Mac so I plug my keyboard into a hub through the KVM’s ‘generic’ USB port.
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.
As far as I understand it, everyone is better off completely avoiding HDMI in favor of DisplayPort if at all possible.* HDMI has many confusing poorly-specified versions, includes a bunch of DRM to serve content cartels rather than the consumer, and just overall is less reliable. Is going to DP an option for you? Hopefully you have DP as an option on both ends of everything.
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 :)
I tested it. It's about 3 seconds when switching to my Mac Mini (where this is the one and only monitor) -- it takes a couple of seconds longer to switch back to my laptop because I use the laptop open and macOS seems to take forever to think about which windows to move around randomly before lighting up the external display.
My first use of Synergy was in the mid 2000's, using the same KB/Mouse on a Windows XP machine with a Debian desktop box next to it. Worked fabulously for a long time.
With VR headsets and increasing 8k TV affordability, screen real estate is really getting big.
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.
> 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.
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.
>Techies almost always have a laptop, phone, and home desktop up at once
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.
Write more in depth on what you want, you describe too many concepts all jumbled together. We have been moving away from homogenous systems for a long time, it is hard to compete if you want to be "the one". Apple is the closest to that but in the same way seems to be the farthest away from what you describe.
How much ongoing development is needed for something like this? I've been using synergy/barrier for years and the features I need have changed barely if at all during that time. Seems like a prime candidate for "finished" software.
Mostly finished. However, these software take advantage of the accessibility features of each OS to emulate mouse and keyboard input. Clipboard access is also required. So as each OS changes the requirements to access those features, someone has to keep updating the software for that.
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.
