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Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

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Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#91

Hi all, I'm the CEO of Symless, the company behind Synergy. I wanted to chime in and let everyone know that you can ask me anything (reply to this comment). I've been working on Synergy as the lead developer since 2006 (before I started the company). Synergy 2 is an early beta and is still under development (the final version will be quite different to what's you see now). All users have access to Synergy 1 ( https:/…

I payed for Synergy because I love the concept, but the UI is pretty much unusable on high DPI screens on Windows and looks like Windows 95. Are there any plans to update it?

Yes, Synergy 2 Beta attempts to address this. https://symless.com/synergy/s2-beta-intro

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#92

Synergy was awesome. Then I payed for the upgrade to 2.0 and it didn't work with corporate proxy. 2.0 has been unusable for me.

Same here. Paid for 2.0 and it was unusable between by Win 10 and Ubuntu boxes. After fighting with it for several hours I just uninstalled and wrote it off as a loss.

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#93
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and starting several months ago I was getting weekly emails asking if I'd be interested in moving to England to work for them as a software engineer. Except, I'm not a software engineer (I'm a hardware guy), just a customer of theirs from V1 days. They made it sound like an emergency situation where they had to stall development until they could recruit some more talent. It got so bad I had to unsub from their m…

No software engineers were fired. There were 3 devs at Symless, including myself, and we left of our own accord for various reasons. This certainly did create a bit of a crisis, because hiring C++ talent in small towns outside of London is hard.

Thanks for the insider update.

I don't understand, with the nature of the product (coming from open source) why is Symless doubling down so hard on centralizing this? Look for remote C++ developers across the world and get the tools to make remote work work well.

I was just talking with a coworker -- I used Synergy around 4-8 years ago, then my employment situation changed and I didn't use it for about 3 years. Have just started using it again, and it seems like it's actually worse than it was then. Anecdotal, obviously, but that's not a good trajectory.

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#94
The Synergy story became a joke:

This guy Nick Bolton took the project to squeeze it. He never really contributed to quality but turned it into closed source. He claimed, that he need to charge for it to finance dev. However, he only invested into the payment wall backend development instead of finally making a stable product.

Nick promised, Synergy would be a lifetime license for all future versions for $1. Sniff sniff. Yes, you smell the right thing.

He promptly broke that promise with v2 and charged again. $29!

But half of the promised features actually exist and more than half of that actually work. Synergy became a scam.

"Open letter" sounds so cool but it is a letter of promises again. Dont fall for it. IMHO, Nick has all narcissist symptoms: Pictures of himself everywhere on his website and promises of everything to everyone. Typical symptoms.

Dont take my words. Look it up in Google and archive.org. His current roadmap is his roadmap from 2014.

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#95
post #52

Synergy used to be great, the original developers really knew what they were doing, but since then it's been taken over by a commercial developer that seems to have no interest in making a good product and far more interest in charging money for it and licensing - more bugs are introduced with every release, clipboard support is half-broken on Linux for years, the Synergy 2.0 release now causes my mouse to continuous…

Nick forked a dead project and wanted to keep developing it, but still needed to pay rent and eat (a common problem among programmers). In order to try to both continue paying for necessary life functions and work on Synergy, he began asking for money. This isn't evil. The project was abandoned when he came along. I'm not saying Nick Bolton has done everything right, he clearly had little to no business experience be…

It is not evil to start charging for a open-source product. However, it IS evil, if you abuse the users money just to build paywall tech instead to improve the software. Look up the bug history and try avoiding the spider webs.

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#96
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some context, the letter came only after months of the same guy dismissing openly or behind the scenes - e.g. not approving posts on the forum - any reported issues and calls from the users that v2 was of beta quality. So I'd say it was an OK move but for sure a forced one after all the negative feedback.

Yep I left after the v2 beta nonsense. He locked my account out from the forums when he didn’t like my feedback. ShareMouse is by far a better product. I feel sorry for the employees but it’ll be a good day when symless goes out of business. Here’s a fine example of Nick Bolton addressing a longstanding bug: https://github.com/symless/synergy-core/issues/5226 He deleted a bunch of comments, locked the conversation an…

I have had the exact same experience. Plus totally unacceptable tweets by Nick. Those have been deleted in the mean time for obvious good reasons.

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#97

Hi all, I'm the CEO of Symless, the company behind Synergy. I wanted to chime in and let everyone know that you can ask me anything (reply to this comment). I've been working on Synergy as the lead developer since 2006 (before I started the company). Synergy 2 is an early beta and is still under development (the final version will be quite different to what's you see now). All users have access to Synergy 1 ( https:/…

Why has this 3+ year old issue continued to be ignored https://github.com/symless/synergy-core/issues/2905

I bought Synergy when I need to work with a windows and mac (Mac being my primary driver) and it made my mac unusable. I used to love Synergy but this made it useless for me and I had to get a refund.

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#98

I've got a lot of use out of this fork: https://github.com/debauchee/barrier SSL & other important features

Adding my support to this. Barrier took a little fiddling to get it working on my 10.9 Mac, but it fixed crashes I'd had with Synergy for years, and seems to have some active devs.

Re: Synergy-core: Open source core of Synergy, the keyboard and mouse sharing tool

#99
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and starting several months ago I was getting weekly emails asking if I'd be interested in moving to England to work for them as a software engineer. Except, I'm not a software engineer (I'm a hardware guy), just a customer of theirs from V1 days. They made it sound like an emergency situation where they had to stall development until they could recruit some more talent. It got so bad I had to unsub from their m…

No software engineers were fired. There were 3 devs at Symless, including myself, and we left of our own accord for various reasons. This certainly did create a bit of a crisis, because hiring C++ talent in small towns outside of London is hard.

Thanks for the info. Please note I never said anyone was fired, perhaps you meant to direct that to the comment above mine?
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