operating systems which one's the best
is it uh Windows 7
macOS Windows 10 Linux
well we figured why decide
we built the ultimate cross platform
workstation running all four of them off
of a single display and
seamlessly check out that mouse movement between
the different os's and this was thanks to some help from our friends at synergy
who sponsored this video so stay tuned because we are going to
show you guys how to do it
all right so let's go over what we've got here first up is our computers so
this one right here this glass tower has our arcade machine pc running Windows 7
and there are a lot of reasons that you might still want an older version of
Windows up and running after you've upgraded to something new
maybe it's older hardware provides better compatibility with older software
especially games that don't play nicely with Windows 10 maybe it's just that you
need Windows 10 for work or school but
you really love Windows 7 and it's telemetry free styles
next up we've got our Windows 10 pc now
Windows 10 supports 4k netflix with the built-in edge browser it's got directx
12 for the latest games and of course
pairing the newest hardware with the most current operating system often
gives you the best driver and accompanying software experience
now let's change gears a little bit this
is our macbook pro maybe you moonlight as a dj and you
prefer the professional audio tools or peripherals that work best or only on
mac maybe you love final cut maybe you love the tight integration with your
iphone and your apple watch there are a
ton of reasons that you might want to have a mac as part of your ultimate
setup so we worked it in bringing us finally
to a little mini Intel nook
this one right here is running Linux ubuntu to be precise so maybe you're a
programmer who needs to be able to quickly compare different os builds side
by side maybe you're a data scientist who works primarily in Windows but then
needs to keep tabs on a Linux machine without ssh or an x maybe some of your
tools just plain run best on Linux so
overall the point we were trying to make there wasn't the specific reasons but
just the fact that there are a lot of reasons that you might want to run
multiple operating systems and while
there are a ton of ways to go about this actually
all of them come with some significant drawbacks so
a dual boot solution like bootcamp requires a system restart to switch
a team viewer introduces significant network latency and reduced image
quality parallels or some other kind of
virtualization solution gives you limited access to hardware pass-through
and speaking of hardware a hardware-based kvm can be really
expensive if you want modern features like
4k 60 hertz support and it only allows
you to control one of your os's
at a time so then let's walk you through how we built our
setup one of the big pieces of special sauce
is actually the monitor this is the same lg
43ud79b that we checked out back in september and we liked it okay at the
time but we saw it basically as a big
display a really big display at the time and we hadn't
fully figured out what we could do with it so it's got four HDMI ports
two 2.0 and two 1.4 then it also has
check this out it's also got DisplayPort
and a usb type-c for input
and this is cool with four machines plugged in you can arrange those inputs
in any order you'd like in quadrants
like this effectively giving you four 21 and a half inch displays and then you
can choose which one of them is going to output through the monitor speakers now
if you want to focus in on one thing you can press the full screen button
here pick whichever one you'd like press the button
and boom you are switched to that particular input 4k
60 hertz depending on which one it's compatible with and then if you want to
switch back we'll just go to here we go picture by
picture you can just apply the previous settings
and give it a couple seconds to pick up all the different signals
and you're going to be back to your quadrants now
we haven't fully solved the problem yet but this is all the hardware we need but
here's our here's our current issue our mouse is stuck in ubuntu right now
because that is where it's plugged in
this is where synergy 2.0 software comes
in let's start with Windows the process is the same on both Windows 7 and
Windows 10. download synergy 2.0 and install it then sign in to activate your
machine once this is done you'll see a representation of the computer you're
currently using in this case our arcade
on the synergy 2.0 app next up is our Windows 10 machine this
is basically the same procedure but once we're done our setup we'll see our
arcade machine all ready and then we'll be able to arrange our Windows 10
machine to line up according to how we've got our displays arranged but wait
there's more moving over to the mac the process is
actually just as simple open up the dmg double-click
login and now we've got three but we're
still missing the last piece of the puzzle Linux
Linux can be a bit trickier for our ubuntu 17.10 install we have an easy to
use deviant package but for those of you running distros that have switched to
weyland by default like newer versions of ubuntu you need to make sure that you
log in with xorg enabled otherwise it won't work it's easy enough to work
around but just a little frustrating and here we are
now i can do what i showed you in the intro so in this configuration watch
this i can just move my mouse cursor between the machines seamlessly so over
here i could uh i could get logged into steam but well okay i matched the enter
key but you get my point the keyboard actually moves with the mouse so i could
go to you know oh oh the website's still up
and check this out copy pasting text between the machines is supported with
copy pasting files and dragging and dropping files coming in synergy 2.0
quite shortly and i think the most impressive
thing is just how quickly and seamlessly the mouse
switches between the different machines
cool right a setup like this
won't be practical for everyone and there are some caveats so let's say you
wanted to take your macbook with you and you unplug it it does take a moment for
all the screens to sync up when something you know disconnects or
reconnects and our ubuntu machine has a
bit of a tendency to grab the mouse controls even when it's
not the focus machine but i think there are people out there
with work areas that are only big enough for a single monitor who might have the
need to run multiple machines simultaneously like this and for those
people even with some of the improvements that still need to be made to synergy 2.0
there is potentially a lot of time and
effort to be saved here
but uh Linus i heard on your forum of all places that
while synergy 2.0 might be prettier with
brain dead simple setup it's still missing some of the features of synergy
one and there's no downgrade rights
yes yes you did hear that so did we
and so did seamless so while seamless has been working on bringing back the
much requested tray icon and an on off button which would be essential for a
configuration like this so that when you full screen you don't have your mouse
flying off the edges we worked out a deal with them
where anyone who bought synergy one or
two with our code the links below our videos
will get upgrade and downgrade rights
for free so you can use whichever
version you prefer and then you can switch whenever you're ready
bam so check out the link to synergy one or
two in the video description to get their multi-platform peripheral sharing
software today for 50 percent off thanks
to synergy for sponsoring this video
so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can press that button but if you liked it hit like get
subscribed or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured we'll have the monitor down there we'll have
synergy down there in the video description also linked in the
description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our
community forum which you should totally join