TL;DR: Want to use my desktop keyboard/mouse with my Laptop. What software are you using/enjoying? Arch+KDE w/ Wayland will be the main host, main client is Windows 11. Secondary hosts may be Debian and MacOS, same client, but low priority on the Mac.
Hey folks, I'm rearranging some things a bit at home, would love to get some current thoughts on keyboard/mouse sharing over IP (no video).
I have to put up with some tools that don't play nicely with wine/proton, and so my work laptop is a windows device. I'll be controlling that device primary from Arch and Debian, though MacOS is a possibility. I'd like to keep the laptop closed and not add another mouse/keyboard into the mix, so Keyb/Mouse over IP it is.
Here's what I'm looking at, haven't tried them all yet, but looking for opinions:
- Barrier - Dead fork. Hasn't been updated in some time, being superseded by input-leap. Most portions of the project managed by someone who had not been active for a couple years before the Input Leap fork.
- Input Leap - Forked from Barrier at the end of 2021, and nearly 3 years later, no stable binary releases yet. Development seems fairly active, but no binary releases yet doesn't provide a massive amount of confidence that it will be stable. Doesn't mean I won't build and test though.
- Lan Mouse - Seems pretty neat, the lack of input capture on MacOS could create an issue for me in certain situations, but I can work around that if I need to for the rare times I'd need it. Traffic is unencrypted/plaintext. Its entirely local, and I've got more security than most users (and some companies), but still. Probably leading the pack right now.
- Deskflow - Upstream project for Synergy, a rename to differentiate the user project from Synergy. TONS of recent activity, but the switch is very recent. I don't know if there are any binaries built, but its a longstanding project (and like many, many others, I used Synergy before it went commercial, it was nice).
Any other options out there? Good/bad experiences with any of these?
This is what I've been missing the most since switching to Wayland.
I was testing again yesterday, on Fedora mainly.
lan-mouse is a bit clunky. It requires too many clicks to start on Gnome. bi-directional. Couldn't get it to work on NixOS but I'm new to it.
Input leap can be finicky to install and set up too, depending on your system. For some reason on my setup it lags a lot, and from time to time I have to reconnect. They don't give an easy access to builds, but you can find them. It requires to be connected with a GitHub account though.
Definitely clunky on lan-mouse.
I'll give input-leap a check with my gh account logged in, see how it goes - I'm curious if I'll have the same fun with latency. Since its mostly for meeting stuff, a bit of lag is ok, but if its choppy or otherwise severe that could be an issue, definitely....