Yes Barrier is very nice. I would use it except for the fact that my work laptop is VPN'd and therefore on a different network to my home LAN.

Barrier uses all IPs, so I use it with my VPN active but via my cross over cable at the library. If my USB WLAN devices supported ad Hoc mode, it would be over a permanent wireless link between the thinkpads.

You can override the default route of the VPN for the LAN.

I'm using this solution atm. Works quite well except the barrier server on Linux is buggy and I need to frequently restart it.

Some ex barrier people cloned (as opposed to forking) the barrier repo and are continuing development on it. It's called input-leap.

yeah, but even they recommend using barrier right? It's strange situation where the maintainers left the project to work on a project without users. It makes sense from a developer perspective though.

I had the opposite impression. They were frustrated that the project owner was not responsive enough but also unwilling to hand over the project. Frankly it looked like a hostileish take over attempt but they don't seem to have any visibility so it didn't seem to have worked. At least a year or so ago it looked like that.

My monitor doesn't have dcc. I've worked around that part by activating automatic input selection and xset dpms force off'ing on the device I want to switch away from.