Apple’s Universal Control loses connection constantly - Eric Cheng

Apple’s Universal Control loses connection constantly

Articles

UPDATE, November 2023: As of Ventura v13.6, I find Universal Control to be unusable, so I have gone back to Synergy 3 RC3, which seems to have improved performance. This has been very stable for the past couple weeks.


As a long time Synergy user, I was excited to switch to Universal Control for single keyboard and mouse sharing between two Macs, especially after moving my Windows machine to a dedicated desk, which meant that I no longer required cross-platform sharing. When I first switched to Universal Control, it just worked. Now that I’m on OS X Ventura v13.5.2, I find that it constantly disconnects. It is sometimes stable for half an hour; at other times, it disconnects after just a few minutes.

I went back to Synergy again, but find that clipboard sharing can cause lag when I move between computers and I need to set a low clipboard size limit to improve performance. Synergy should offer an option to sync the clipboard asynchronously when the mouse moves between machines. Perhaps I missed a setting?

In any case, I’m back on Universal Control again, and now leave the Universal Control system setting window open in the corner of my screen near where the cursor passes through to the next computer. If the mouse won’t pass through the edge, I quickly toggle the enable/disable switch, which resets the feature and instantly fixes it… until the next time it fails. It’s pretty terrible to have to do this.

The Logitech device sharing feature could also be an option; unfortunately, I’m on a Kinesis split ergo keyboard.