I’m using a recent 42" LG OLED TV as a large affordable PC monitor in order to support 4K@120Hz+HDR@10bit, which is great for gaming or content creation that can appreciate the screen real estate. Anything in the proper PC Monitor market similarly sized or even slightly smaller costs way more per screen area and feature parity.

Unfortunately such TVs rarely include anything other than HDMI for digital video input, regardless of the growing trend connecting gaming PCs in the living room, like with fiber optic HDMI cables. I actually went with a GPU with more than one HDMI output so I could display to both TVs in the house simultaneously.

Also, having an API as well as a remote to control my monitor is kind of nice. Enough folks are using LG TVs as monitors for this midsize range that there even open source projects to entirely mimic conventional display behaviors:

• https://github.com/JPersson77/LGTVCompanion
• https://github.com/cali-95/LGTVLinuxCompanion

I also kind of like using the TV as simple KVMs with less cables. For example with audio, I can independently control volume and mux output to either speakers or multiple Bluetooth devices from the TV, without having fiddle around with repairing Bluetooth peripherals to each PC or gaming console. That’s particularly nice when swapping from playing games on the PC to watching movies on a Chromecast with a friend over two pairs of headphones, while still keeping the house quite for the family. That kind of KVM functionality and connectivity is still kind of a premium feature for modest priced PC monitors. Of course others find their own use cases for hacking the TV remote APIs:

• https://youtu.be/io_AFseYleE
• https://youtu.be/76wAEJOdBq8

I’ll note that when using multiple windows, I recall that switching the user in one window would switch the user for all other windows as well, so support for simultaneous user sessions would probably have to be added as well.

This screenshot was from a Samsung Tab S8 Ultra. You can run 4 onscreen apps at a time (if you include a floating popup window in the mix) with multi windowing on Android 13 (outside Dex).

Getting the screenshot took a little tinkering, as after the first window split, getting the third instance of sync on the screen required using the Samsung side panel to drop an unrelated app in the third quadrant, then using the launcher to alt-tab the display to Fullscreen the third instance of sync, then alt-tabing back to Fullscreen the 3 app multi window view, then using the quick app switch gesture to swap out the unrelated app for the third instance of sync. It was a little overly complicated.

Multi tasking and window tiling in Samsung Dex is a lot easier, or more intuitive, to replicate the kind of thing, but I still prefer androids native launcher layout, as app windows don’t have needless title bars, and the same navigation gestures work better when not breaking out the mouse and keyboard.

Thanks so much for your hard work and the terrific beta release!
Here’s to the success of Lemmy, Sync for Lemmy, and the rest of the Fediverse,
Cheers! 🍻

Hello world!
~ from S4L!