Yes that's 2 laptops
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Battlestations
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How did you even manage to dual monitor another laptop? Is this some kind of software?
Yes it's an optional feature on windows 10/11 called "wireless display" and as you expected it speed depends on how good your wifi is
You should consider a virtual KVM like Barrier instead. You just run a piece of software on both computers, set one as the server, and use its keyboard and mouse to drive two or more computers like they're dual+ monitors.
The way it is far superior is you're just sending the keyboard and mouse info. Little overhead. You get to use all of the resources of both computers instead of wasting a bunch of everything on video processing. You can even still copy/paste at least text, so only dragging files across PCs is annoying, which can be worked around with shared folders.
I guess it doesn't help single applications using both monitors, but that doesn't come up often for me since the main computer is connected to multiple, too. I mostly use it as an actual kvm to switch between work and personal, and drive a satellite laptop for entertainment/doc refs.
That's my solution, I use barrier for mouse and keyboard and soundit for sending sounds to my main laptop and it's works well (UAC prompt still pretty annoying tho it make mouse and keyboard stopped working for a few seconds), I use wireless display just so I can say I had dual monitor XD
Haha lovely. Yea, the UAC interrupting it is definitely an annoyance. At least Windows usually lets the mouse back on. Usually...
That seems like a much better solution. How is Barrier different from using vnc or some other remote desktop sharing service?
Or I guess I should ask what is the key difference that would prompt you to use one over the other?
Barrier is much faster due to it's only sending mouse and keyboard information also easier to setup and seamless
Makes sense.
Mostly the use cases. Barrier or other KVM-like solutions are great if you don't literally 'need' only an extra monitor attached to a single PC. The biggest workflow issues I see with vietual KVM's are just what I mentioned (maybe in an edit): one app on both monitors is a no-go, drag and drop files is annoying, but otherwise it's nice to be able to fully utilize the remote system.
It's different from VNC/RDP/etc in that it doesn't actually feed video anywhere. The remote system still has to be connected to an actual display, like a laptop's own display. So they're all kind of tackling the problem in different ways.
VNC/RDP/etc: allow full remote access to a computer that doesn't need a monitor attached at all. Barrier/software input: Only let you wiggle the mouse and hit keys remotely. (but it does work for the login screen on Windows and Linux if it runs at startup) Software monitor: Removes the ability to drive the remote computer and turns it in to a very power hungry monitor, but it's a direct display.
The remote desktop ones also 'can' integrate well with the window manager which allows them to know what parts of the screen are updating, and send only updated regions. They tend to be quite a lot less overhead than a constant video stream. Though with hardware acceleration these days, a constant video stream is less of an ask than it used to be.
Ok that makes sense if I'm understanding correctly. Barrier is just sending control inputs to a headed machine, which are displayed on that machine's head only. VNC/RDP is sending display info from a possibly headless machine to the controlling machine's head, in addition to receiving control inputs.
This seems like the truly janky part to me.