My girlfriend just moved in with me. We both work in tech and both work from home at the same time occasionally. We have one wide desk with a couple of monitors on it.
Whenever we switch between who gets to sit at the desk there are a lot of cables that have to be switched between devices and it looks a bit messy.
I would like to have a setup that would allow us to sit side by side at the desk and use one screen each.
I would like it to be as simple as plugging in a single USB-C cable and everything is set up (one for each side, that is).
The big ask is; I also want to be able to take control of both screens from a single computer whenever one of us is not working from home and the one who does has access to the whole desk.
I want to be able to switch between sharing 2 screens between 2 laptops and controlling both screens with that same computer. Switching should be quick and easy.
The problem is; All solutions I have found include getting something like 2 KVM switches and 3 USB-C docks and plugging them together in a funky configuration.
Not only is that a lot of tech for solving the problem, it is also very expensive.
Do you have any advice on how we could get this to work in a reasonable way? How would you solve it?
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I can’t think of any methods to reduce the cable swapping to a single connection that wouldn’t involve KVMs. Assuming both monitors have multiple input ports, and the laptops have multiple outputs allowing connections to both monitors, that would still necessitate at least 2 cables having to be dis/connected. Not sure what cables you’re swapping (HDMI? DVI? DP? VGA?) but maybe there’s a cheap(ish) hardware splitter to toggle between connection profiles? No idea how the laptops will see the connections or if such a thing exists for your purposes.
Offhand, I also can’t think of a simple method to stream output(s) to the monitors without some kind of permanently attached host [something like Sunshine or Moonlight maybe].How much wire fiddling are you willing to deal with? What about monitor settings?
Presumably, you already each have a dock capable of outputting to 2 screens, connected to your usual peripherals like keyboard and mouse plus 1 screen. On those special days, you could simply move the screen connector to the other dock.
If you want to do this with no cable swapping but a fair amount of config each time, and you have the appropriate connectors, you can connect each screen to each dock. For instance, yours are the HDMI input, hers are DisplayPort. You would switch input on the monitors as needed, but you’ll probably need to go into Windows display settings to enable/disable the second screen each time it changes.
