BeepWHERE THE FUCK IS THE CURSOR?
Sylvartas
KraidenI have a friend who works for Transpower (company in charge of NZ electric grid) and occasionally goes into their control rooms. Apparently they have set ups like this. It gets worse, because there are several computers hooked up to the different monitors, so not only do they have a wall of monitors, they have a bunch of different keyboards and mice (mouses?) that they have to hunt through if they want to actually interact with something
They need to invest in some KVM switches. Just leave the monitors connected directly to the towers but route the input devices through the switch. There’s no good reason for a single person to face more than one keyboard and mouse at the same desk.
u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)Reminds me of VirtualBox on Wayland. It won’t correctly capture the mouse, so it just exits and re-enters the window in random positions. Say, on guest you see it in middle left, you move it a bit to the right, and it jumps out of bottom right corner.
So, time to have a second mouse, and do USB passthrough.
But also UEFI on my HP mini PC doesn’t work with every keyboard, so a second keyboard for UEFI.
There’s plenty of good reasons. Redundancy, simplicity, speed, physical context switching…
Redundancy for a keyboard and mouse? Keep an extra set in the drawer or something. No need to have them all out and connected. Simplicity? How is it simpler to have multiple input devices littered about than once set? Speed? Speed of what? Of input? The latency on a KVM is negligible, particularly for an IO device? Speed of swapping? With multiple keyboards and mice, you have up manually move around devices and/or your body. With a KVM, you press a button. How is that slower?
Physical context switching is the only thing I’ll grant you, but I don’t see how that’s such a benefit compared to the hassle, clutter, and hectic work flow when you can just use a KVM.
One of the operator pulpits at my work can be run by one pulpit operator, but commonly has multiple people in it - someone is almost always being trained, floor operators hang out on break or when maintenance has to take the machine for a while, lead operators and supervisors and quality personnel stop in to monitor. They have I think five computers, all with their own keyboard and mouse. The operator mainly interacts with just one, and the others are set up for reference spread all around the edges of this room that comfortably holds five people. It works pretty well because the auxiliary people can look stuff up on the reference computers without having to take away keyboard or mouse control from the operator, and with how physically distant some of the machines are from each other, a switched keyboard would have to get carried around the room which would be annoying.
Sure but that is entirely different than having all of those monitors at the same single desk with multiple input devices only accessible by the one person at that desk.
We’re probably thinking about very different work environments.
Redundancy is more about not having a single point of failure. If you have a need for a redundant system, having a single point of failure in the KVM means you no longer have cc a redundant system.
For me, I find it simpler having a dedicated keyboard and mouse per computer, mainly to avoid the mad wiggle of the mouse to find the cursor, and then wiggle again because you found the cursor but it’s not moving, has it crashed? Oh that’s right, I’m using a KVM, and I’m controlling the computer that’s over there. With dedicated keyboard and mouse, it’s always obvious which machine I’ll be controlling. And yeah, I meant slower to switch. You need to move your hand off the keyboard to press the button, then move your hands back, usually having a slightly awkward pause when it takes a moment to register the switch. With dedicated keyboards, you move your hands once, done.
And I can think of plenty of scenarios where you want to do an action at the same time on two machines. Want to compare two copies of a document across the two machines? Left hand on page down for one machine, right on the other. Trying to test a bug that mucks up the timing of a jump in a game on one system but not the other? Spacebar at the same time. Going through the same install process simultaneously on 4 machines? It either takes four key presses on different keyboards to select an option, or four key presses and four KVM button presses.
For a lot of stuff, KVM is the way to go, especially if you tend to just do a bunch of stuff on one machine, then do a bunch of stuff on another. For a lot of situations though, such as if you’re having to only do occasional stuff, or doing lots of small things on different machines, it’s not the way to go.
I did not expect to be writing such a detailed essay on such a trivial thing today, so thanks for coming to my TED talk!
There is crossplatform software for mouse/keyboard sharing.