KVM: what is your favorite?
I have one of those fancy MSI gaming monitors, with a built-in KVM. It's pretty infuriating. If there's no video input, it stops forwarding keyboard and mouse commands. No way to switch keyboard and mouse via the keyboard. You have to use the toggle button on the monitor buried under multiple menus.
I'm looking for a nice KVM that people can recommend. I mostly care about the keyboard and mouse switching. I guess that's a KM. Ideally it wouldn't take multiple seconds for the USB to register on the new device when I switch. Bonus points if I can switch just using a keyboard combination.
https://github.com/debauchee/barrier Is an open source software option, that basically forward your keyboard and mouse over the network between machines. It's interesting.
I have some very sensitive systems, and I wouldn't be comfortable installing binary blobs on them, and a few are off the network entirely. So this solution would be less than ideal, but it's really cool.
What's your favorite KVM? How many machines do you have hooked up right now to the computer using?
Just FYI, Barrier has been abandoned / unsupported for awhile. Although the last release mostly works, don't expect future support.
Its successor is https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap, and although there have been some coy maintainance on it, they have yet to provide an installable release, due to "reasons".
I use Synergy myself, which is the ancestor of both of the above. Although it started as open source, it has been turned into a commercial product a long time ago, which is why I'm not providing the link here. It's still maintained, for better or for worse, but in the latest release-to-be they revamped the UI and for some reason I couldn't get it to work at all on my setup - it seems to rely on some auto configuration / autodetection gimmickry which simply is not working here. To make matters worse, the new UI is essentially an electron app, which means it has become a lot more bloated. And then there's also the telemetry thing. I've been using the old 1.1 legacy version, holding out hope that input-leap eventually lifts off.
I recently went on the same journey and reverted back to an old version of synergy. Been getting paid to work in IT since the late 90s and gave it my best shot. :)
Thank you for posting this. I have been avoiding updating to synergy 3 and now I’m glad I did. I still like version 2. I would still recommend it. I even use it with gaming.