GoKawiilI’ve got a Mac laptop and Linux desktop, and use the same keyboard, mouse, and monitor for both. If you also work from home, I’m sure you can relate… laptop for work, desktop for hobby… but only one monitor and peripherals.
Switching between the two machines has always been a pain. It requires either fiddling around with plugging and unplugging cables at the back of the monitor, using flaky USB-C switches, or annoying dongles.
With a recent upgrade of my monitor I wanted to solve this problem for good; I wanted to be able to switch between the two machines very quickly, without any fiddling. In fact, even lifting my hands off the keyboard would be considered failure.
Well, I’ve done it. Behold:
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A couple of things have made this possible:
Getting a monitor with KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) functionality built in, so I can plug USB inputs into it and have them follow whatever the active input source is, and… Using DDC (Display Data Channel) commands to control the monitor via its HDMI/DP cable.
Let’s go into these one by one…
The monitor
I won’t bury the lede. It’s the MSI MPG 321URX (affiliate link). The main draw of this thing is its absolutely beautiful QLED panel that runs 4K at 240 Hz. Good for programming, good for gaming.
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