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Comment by pama | Hacker News Reader

Not much is less known in the tech world, so I use as a dock the CalDigit TS3 Plus, connected to two external mechanical keyboards, the blue yeti mic with wired headphones, a Logitech MX vertical mouse, and a huge monitor with a simple ring light and a webcam on top. My favorite headphones throughout the pandemic were the Drop THX pandas, but they broke a month ago and I haven’t fixed them yet, so now I use the Monolith M1060C.

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I got that thunderbolt dock for my work MacBook, and now that I own a steam deck I wish I had gotten a USBC hub instead. The dock is great, just doesn’t work with the steam deck, so I can’t swap devices quickly.

I have a Stream Deck XL connected to the TS3, seems to work fine (although I'm using BetterTouchTool to power it rather than the default software)

I'm guessing it's a TB3 dock? TB4 docks usually work with USB as well.

>two external mechanical keyboards

How do you make use of two keyboards?

Actually I am thinking if we one could use 2 keyboards to have a makeshift "split" keyboard setup.

That actually works, at least in Windows. I haven't tried it on Linux or BSD.

It not only works on Linux, but you can choose between having all keyboards work together (default) or sending different keyboards' inputs to different consumers. For instance, you can have two monitors, two keyboards, and two mice, then run two X servers and have two people sitting at one computer both doing meaningful work.

Hehe...you could do the 2 user/1 machine trick on DEC Microvax IIs back in the day before it got cheaper to buy a NCD xterminal than the extra DEC kit to make it work. I recall it was a supported configuration you could order from DEC, but someone had to hack up our local fork of 4.2/4.3 BSD to make it work.

I only use one of them at a time but I may swap depending on the mood; each has a very different feel.

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