I had wondered about that from the title and first bullet but the third bullet fixes that.
Presuming the wireless mouse uses a USB dongle, how about putting it on a USB KVM switch?
If my idea works, then you’d need if you can find a keyboard with its own USB port maybe you can daisychain it to the keyboard via the same KVM switch?
This would be too messy for me, as I have a small table that already has 3 laptops on it that I occasionally move around, so I don’t want to run cables from all 3 laptops to the switch.
There doesn’t seem to be any wireless KVM switches from what I could see =/
A mouse like the MX Master 3 mouse would be perfect, except Logitech chose to put the button to change devices on the bottom of the mouse making it very inconvenient to press and forcing users to use the Flow feature which is bad because it enables file sharing between the computers, and also isn’t available for Linux.
I hadn’t heard of it, thanks for the tip. I installed it on 2 machines and it works fine. Better than I was doing before for sure (unplugging and plugging the USB receiver for my mouse/keyboard), but it still isn’t a smooth experience and I feel like I am using my second computer via RDP because of the mouse lag.
I will keep looking for a native solution (i.e. switch directly where the mouse/keyboard commands are processed instead of sending it through the network), but in the mean time, I definitively appreciate the help!
I use Logitech M590 and for my purposes it’s quite convenient. It has a physical button on the top and supports two communication interfaces: bluetooth and that logitech “unifying” standard. The physical button can switch the mouse between two computers only, but if I remember correctly, I paired it with more than one “unifying” usb dongles, so it should work with three computers or more, but you will only be able to switch only between two of them - the rest will just have duplicated mouse cursor.
Would you please explain why it is so inconvenient for you to use the button underneath the mouse? Of course it would have been easier if the buttons where placed on top but its really not that difficult. Do you switch between host systems very often?
And what is the Flow feature? I have a Logitech mouse (MX something I believe, can lookup later). I do not use any special software. Okay there is a rudimentary thing which shows connected devices and their power status, but that isn’t needed.
Also maybe interesting to people is the Logitech craft keyboard with unified receiver, Bluetooth, and USB (which I believe is only there to charge the integrated accumulator. It’s heavy, I can’t use the wheel (at least not out of the box) and I am not satisfied with the keys. One key is already damaged without heavy usage.
Yes, I do. When I am working from home, I have my personal computer, my company’s “executive” laptop and a pentest laptop open at the same time. While most of the time I will use only one, for some specific tasks I have to switch host systems very often.
Having to turn my mouse over every time I need to switch would be a significant pain to my workflow. And to add to that, I am a little too obsessed with my user experience to the point that I would gladly spend 2 whole days configuring something if that means I am able to save 1 or 2 seconds every time I do some common task.
Logitech Flow allows you to control how you want to switch devices if the mouse is connected to more than one, for example by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen.
It also supports some additional features, such as shared clipboard and seamless file copying between different machines, but I don’t really want that and it sounds like a security nightmare. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because it is not available for Linux
An alternative would be using barrier. In this case I don’t even need a mouse/keyboard that connects to all devices, but the downsides are that there is some lag and the mouse/keyboard input goes over the network. (The computers might not be networked together and I would like to keep it that way). Also, it might be tricky to get it to work with Qubes.
All this trouble can be avoided by simply having an accessible button to switch devices, like the M720. This looks like the right choice for me, even though I would much prefer something like the MX Master 3 if it had a more accessible button. I guess I will try the MX and if it’s too much of a pain I will buy the M720 for work with multiple devices and save the MX Master 3 for situations where I am not switching too often.
I bought the MX Keys keyboard, which is pretty similar, except that it doesn’t have the wheel and it is smaller. I am not particularly picky about the keys, since I use mostly laptop keyboards and I am not used to any fancy keyboard, I just want a wireless keyboard that doesn’t take much space and is able to connect to multiple devices.