Host OS Guessing

[eltariel]

Weird idea: if we can detect the host OS, then we could handle platform-specific bits (lock, multi-screen, etc) without the user needing to configure it.

I'd suggest adding an "auto" OS type which enables detection, and use that by default if it's reliable. We'd still likely want to keep the existing OS types to override the guessing, since there are any number of things that could make it not work correctly (I'm thinking KVM but there's plenty of other possible reasons to not work).

Yeah, this is definitely out of spec, and we'd have to rely on implementation quirks that could change unexpectedly. There is an implementation of host detection in one of the TinyUSB uac2 examples (here) - it uses the ordering of descriptor requests to determine the OS. We could potentially use this or something similar.

[hrvach]

I was looking into this before and it should definitely be doable. Even if not 100% reliable, the best you can do with picking a default right now is to base your choice on desktop OS usage statistics. Having a zero-touch detection and config would be a preferred option because I'm a big fan of things that Just Work. 👍

[chris-010]

Isn't the UserAgent string from the browser which opens the Deskhop web config 100% reliable to detect the guest os?
In case, it hasn't been spoofed for some reason.

[eltariel]

Using the browser's user agent has a bunch of limitations:

• Only detects the side that the browser is running on
• Needs the OS to allow USB Mass Storage connections (i.e. won't work on my $client laptop)
• Doesn't automatically update when unplugging from a mac and connecting to a windows machine

What I'm suggesting is automatically guessing which host OS is connected to each side, every time you plug in, with no user interaction. The configuration for host OS could then just be an override if we failed to detect it for some reason.

Unfortunately this is of course not something that USB supports even if it is technically possible due to implementation details 🤣