Comment by rupas

4 months ago

I've used a few of these KVM products. Some quick thoughts:

ipkvm, I really like my 2 JetKVMs. It works very well, physically feels substantial, and the ATX power add-on makes remote management as good as any IPMI solution. I also have a sipeed NanoKVM and that works well, but I don't use it much at this point, just use the JetKVMs instead.

For usb KVM I'm trying to find something that works as a KVM so that I can use the nice display on my home computer but also control my work laptop. This is purely a convenience thing. I'm not trying to use the work laptop remotely or fool my employer. I just prefer my 4k oled display on my personal thinkpad over the crap 1080p dell display on the work laptop.

So I've tried two usb USB kvms.

Cytrence Kiwi - this is the one I settle on to use. The software works well and has had regular updates. It does keyboard capture which I never could get to work with the NanoKVM. The video quality is much better. Except for the inability to capture alt-tab is my only real complaint. :( However, they just (yesterday?) released a new software build that can map another set of keys to alt-tab. Maybe I can train my fingers to do windows-tab or something similar.

NanoKVM-USB - This one has some good ideas. I like the form factor. I like the USB port you can easily switch between host and target to copy images or whatever. As a crash cart type thingie, this is probably just fine. However, as stated above. Trying to use it full time with my work laptop was simply too frustrating. Video quality and lack of keyboard capture (maybe I just couldn't find it) just made it impossible.