You need a KVM with an EDID emulator. HDMI switcher just swaps output ports, while a KVM+EDID emulates device status.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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I think what you want is an EDID emulator with passthrough or whatever it's called. EDID is how a monitor tells a device what resolution to send and other info. Some cheap HDMI splitters, adapters, audio extractors, etc will let you emulate a specific EDID. One of my audio extractors lets you fake stereo vs surround support to trick the source into sending surround - I think that's also through EDID - since if you're trying to extract surround, it might be because your real TVs EDID is for stereo I assume. So you probably want something like that in before the switch so that the laptop always thinks something is plugged in. Your switch seems to be too smart in actually passing through the real monitor's EDID so the laptop is able to see when it switches.
Just use the linux equivalent of https://github.com/VirtualDrivers/Virtual-Display-Driver
When the wayland people stop pretending you don't need it
in 3 to 5 years, sometime around when they realize that network transparency is really important actually