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Comment by durazabu | Hacker News Reader

Barrier has been forked to https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap which has a hundred more commits by the same devs.

The name is still barrier though, has anyone more info about this fork?

They have an issue where they explain that they have disagreements with how barrier is run and the current owner does not want to pass control to them. They are the most active recent contributors.

personally I am waiting for them to cut a stable release and then try it out.

https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap/issues/1414

I see, I am surprised they don't mention the fact that barrier doesn't appear in github search [1], most likely because it is tagged as a fork.

[1] https://github.com/search?q=barrier

I only just recently heard about the synergy -> barrier transition and got everything dialed in on barrier...

sigh. The aristocrats!

Barrier and input-leap are nice and all, but they're written for only modern OSes using modern library versions and language features.

If you want to share a mouse with an OS older than a decade or so you'll still have to use the original Synergy 1.x. It works on both old machines/OSes (all the way back to the 90s) and on the very newest released OSes. Given that, I don't really see a need for barrier or input leap. They're kind of niche, but it's nice someone's keeping the codebase going.

Basically the only reason to use newer forks of synergy is if you have an abnormally high DPI screen in your span.

But Synergy is now commercial, with a stupid surcharge for TLS, so would it make more sense to say "the only reason to use synergy is if you're using an old OS and don't have hi-DPI screens"?

No, you're thinking of the Synergy 2.x codebase. No one uses that and it's why Barrier exists. But Synergy 1.x is open and free as in freedom.

Gotcha, thanks. I used to use Synergy 1.x, and it was great. Recently returned to the fray and didn't have time to build-from-source (or didn't find an easy 1.x installer for new OS X) so grumble-grumbled and paid for Synergy 2. and expensed it.

> if you have an abnormally high DPI screen in your span.

Like any MacBook Pro post 2015?

Synergy is not a problem on any of my highdpi systems, MacBook, 4k in Linux And windows

I had a plan to run older period VMs or even period hardware to play older PC games, and use something like parsec to view them. Unfortunately, despite there being a number of desktop streaming solutions available I couldn't find any that supported even WindowsXP, much less 9x. Windows 7 was about the best I could do.

Not 100% sure this fits your use case but UltraVNC goes back to w95.

Oh boy. I hope they’re not planning to make money off it or start adding a crypto wallet…

Interesting. I'm a long time Synergy user and recently tried Barrier and it simply didn't work. I'm going from a Linux server (personal) to a MacOS client (work equipment). Synergy has been mostly fine but I have had small problems that I was hoping Barrier would clear it up.

Thanks for linking this project, I wouldn't have seen it otherwise. Will be giving this a try this afternoon.

I found disabling encryption worked for me.

Isn't barrier a fork of the original synergy2 as well? That went closed-source/commercial ?

Forked from synergy 1.9

I don't know if this is still the case, but for a while it was both commercial and open source. You could change the license check to just "return true" and compile it yourself to get things like the SSL plugin. IIRC there was also a comment that detailed the algorithm for generating keys, so you could come up with one in your own name.

Geez, only a few months ago I noticed that synergy wasn't in APT anymore and had to learn about (and set up) barrier.

Now it's forked again?! I don't know what, but this smells like something bad.

Thanks, bookmarked. Was using Synergy in past and was great.

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