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Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

I have a saying “nothing sucks like synergy but they all do”. Not a single one of these technologies is reliable. But synergy is the one that has multiple times made even the connected keyboard stop working to the point where the machine needs to be power cycled to become responsive.

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Thing is, I used the old OSS Synergy some 15-20 years ago, across Linux, Windows and I believe OSX as well (although I am not 100% certain about the latter). It worked absolutely flawlessly for several years while I used it and I loved it dearly. Fast forward (I had no need for a software kvm until last year) and I use Barrier now and it barely works. Autostart on Windows doesn't work at all, the installer failed to create certificates so nothing worked until I created them manually and sometimes the keyboard dies completely or exhibits frustrating bugs which only a reboot can solve. It's baffling how this used to work so well and is barely usable 15+ years later.

Totally agree. Back in 2004 I used it daily to bridge between two PCs running on one network, behind a firewall with one running the synergy server and the other the client, and a laptop running the client. Both PCs were under my desk with my laptop and two screens from the PCs on top. I had one keyboard and mouse across three screens powered by three computers and could seamlessly not only move my mouse across all 3, but also copy paste text across too. I believe a newer version (which may never have materialized before it went closed source) was going to have drag n drop across too. It was so easy to work with and remember it very fondly. It was magic stuff.

Turn off clipboard sharing, use a config file, and barrier works well on most systems.

Way too much BS to get it running though.

It works until it doesn't. And clipboard sharing is "essential" to me. Wrt/ clipboard sharing, yes, I could work around not having it available but that's 50% of why I use it in the first place and as I said everything worked absolutely as expected in the olden days. Yet another tech that has only gotten worse over the last decate, similar to the shit show that instant messaging has become. I miss the times where I could run a well-integrated multi-protocol chat client on all of my computers regardless of OS which required basically no RAM or CPU usage to chat with all my contacts regardless of what protocol they used. Now it's mostly Electron crap eye candy taking too much resources by a factor of >100 and way too much screen estate. It's simply not practical anymore. "Things were better before" is in 99% of cases a factually untrue, romanticized view on the past, but sometimes it's objectively true, and in rare cases like IM there are serious negative effects on my personal quality of life that I cannot fix on my end because the system itself is broken.

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