The Code Sewist

I love minimalism, clutter free desktop setups, reliance on as few gadgets as possible—but at the same time, I enjoy playing with computers, servers, and self-hosting services for my own convenience. In practice, this means I need to balance out my love of technology with my desire to keep it all minimal.

One thing that I think has been a game changer in recent years is DisplayPort Alt Mode, which, put simply, makes it possible to dock your computer to your computer monitor with only a single USB-C cable.

That in itself doesn't sound like much, since you could do the same thing with a DisplayPort or HDMI cable. The trick is, that the same USB-C cable can also carry data transfer and power delivery, meaning that the USB-C cable is all you need between your computer and everything else.

To summarize, that one single cable between my laptop (or steam deck) and my ultra-wide monitor (another great invention) connects the following hardware to my PC:

• Power delivery (it's charging!)
• Monitor (video)
• Speakers (audio)
• Keyboard / mouse
• Webcam
• External SSD (when needed)

All with one cable!

In essence, the monitor is the dock, and all my usual hardware is conveniently connected to my monitor. Using a single cable, I can switch out my laptop for my steam deck or any other mini-computer that supports “DisplayPort Alt Mode” or “Thunderbolt 3” (of which “alt mode” is a subset), and still keep everything else on my desktop the same.

I realize that this has been mainstream for quite a while, but as usual, I'm late to the party and a bit older than the average gamer. I remember in a not so distance past (meaning a year ago in my case) where my desktop had cables for everything, and I had to use a USB-dock because of the lack of ports on my laptop.

It's such a small thing, yet I could never live without now. It makes everything so much simpler if you need to switch between computers.

And that's all I wanted to say today.