I have 2 monitors, 2 keyboards, 2 mice, and 1 computer. How can I set it up for shared use?
I know this was possible on X but with Wayland maturing I assume it’s moved over.
I had a set up like this about 15 years ago on my system, but haven’t looked at the options recently.
It looks like it is supported. See here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Multiseat
You can do it but using a junk second computer with no hard drive, a slow CPU and little memory.
This is the thin-client concept and it has been in use going all the way back to mainframes. It lost popularity when personal computers- PCs- got cheap.
Works like this:
The thin client BIOS is set to boot over the network. It locates your desktop, downloads a small OS and displays a login, to your remote desktop.
From there, it’s passing through the keyboard and mouse input to remote server and displaying the output. The real CPU work is all handled by the server.
The whole Edubuntu distro was built around this design. You could have one decent computer in a school computer lap and 20 crappy thin clients and everything would feel pretty snappy and work pretty well. Cheap and low maintenance to admin with only one hard drive / distro to maintain!
If you have an integrated GPU and discrete GPU, or if you buy a cheap GPU, you can multi-seat. That’s the enlightened path.
There’s also this: https://blinry.org/multi-seat-wayland/
On kde you just click “switch user”, log into the new session and then use Ctrl+shift+F#, much like X11
comment to watch the thread
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Multiseat
It sounds like you need a second video card, rather than two monitors plugged into the one card.
Oh well, maybe after the bubble bursts.
See if your CPU has integrated graphics - you could use that.
I was going to say that you could get a low end graphics card like an RX550, but even those have gone up in price. They originally sold for $70 for the 4GB model and were around $30-35 second-hand before everything went up.
Avoid low-end Nvidia on Linux, as they become VRAM-constrained. Nvidia’s Linux driver doesn’t let GPUs swap to system RAM like AMD’s and Intel’s do.
It looks to work fine with USB graphics adapters too.
It is possible, but it is not a wayland limitation per-say but a compositor one (aka the wayland server), and I say “limitation” if the compositor doesn’t have multi-display option.
Technically wayland is not the issue:
If you look at your
/run/user/[uisd](uid is probably 1000) you will see the wayland “displays” (socket here), usually namedwayland-X. The/run[...]is usually set from $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR while the wayland socket to be used is set in the environment variable $WAYLAND_DISPLAY. So running an application in a 2nd session would just require setting the $WAYLAND_DISPLAY to an other value (that exists).It seems that Sway is able to do this with the
outputcommand.I assumed this was possible, would be very handy for having multiple sessions running
I’ve been looking into ways to do funky things with graphical sessions and am considering switching to a setup based on GNOME Remote Desktop and headless mode to have multiple sessions at the same time (although that differs from what OP is looking for)
