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KVM: what is your favorite? (hackertalks.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by jet@hackertalks.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

At my main desk I have 3 machines hooked up constantly, with a workbench that sees multiple test benches at various times.

I was using moonlight to stream from a windows machine, and that worked well but some banding in some games annoyed me so I got a dedicated monitor for it, the msi. I can't complain about the MSI monitor, it's core function works fine. It does HDR, it's thunderbolt 4 compatible, it's got silly RGB that won't consistently turn off. The KVM aspect of it is annoying, and it has spyware built into it. It's basically a mini computer. When you first turn the monitor on it loads a USB drive onto the host computer, and tries to install its "drivers". That's super fucking sketchy. But once you have the drivers installed, it disables that boot drive. So it stops trying to do that to your other systems. If the monitor API was open source so that I could write a driver for each of the computers I'd probably be happy enough.