I am not home at the moment but I believe the setup I got working was the Club 3D CAC-1080 Display Port to HDMI adapter. The trick, as I understand it, is that these adapters support tunneling the CEC traffic to/from Display Port AUX, and many of the Linux DRM drivers support this. It has been a while since I actually set it up, but I don't remember it being particularly hard. I have a couple different adapters that theoretically support CEC I believe but that's the one I recall working.

> As for remote control - why would you want one for the monitor.

It certainly isn't strictly necessary, but it remains useful for input switching, and as a convenient backup option for power/volume. In the presence of a good fullscreen UI, I could see it being useful for basic directional input as well.

You can of course go the other way and handle input switching and all else via the PC, but that does mean if the PC isn't on nothing else works at all.

> integrated touchpad that you don’t hate.

> no mouse buttons

Failed at the first sentence.