Synergy-core: Wayland support for Linux client and server

[nbolton]

Problem: We do not support Wayland on Linux. Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain.

Solution: Add Wayland support for both the client and server.

From Wikipedia:

In general, out of the box support for a full desktop running Wayland in major Linux distributions is still in early stages. Most Linux distributions that ship version 3.20 or newer of the Gnome desktop environment do support manually installing a Wayland session, and in case of Gnome 3.22 or newer might default to Wayland. Notable early adopters that provide Wayland out of the box are:

Fedora starting with version 25 uses Wayland for the default GNOME 3.22 desktop session, with X.Org as a fallback if the graphics driver cannot support Wayland.[65] Fedora 25 carries patches that make the Wayland session work with NVidia drivers as well.[66]
...

[circuit-breaker]

Agreed, Wayland is coming fast. Nvidia has been busy parting out the bulk of their drivers.. And the design means a lot more walls between applications and not touching each other's resources unchecked. It is the future

[Pajinek]

When do you plan to support wayland? Is it question of far future? I tried it and synergy doesn't work correct.

[lig]

I'm switched to Gnome 3.16 and will use Wayland from now on as it work pretty stable for me unlike Gnome on Xorg. Thus I will not be able to use Synergy until this will be resolved.

[neilmayhew]

I'd like to vote for this too.

[neilmayhew]

I did some quick experimentation with using synergy through xwayland (which happens automatically) and it starts to go wrong when trying to grab the pointer on leaving the screen. I commented out the lines in XWindowsScreen.cpp and was able to get a bit further, actually controlling the mouse on the other screen, but the movement wasn't positioned correctly.

I'm using a Debian Jessie system, and Wayland has been a login option for some time. I don't even need to use weston, because gnome-shell (and almost all other gtk3 apps) can use wayland directly. So Debian would make a good testbed.

[Kami-no]

+1 vote to support Wayland.

[gregsheremeta]

+1 gonna need this soon!

[skoslowski]

+1

[dotted]

+1

[hertzg]

+1

[acdingman]

I don't care about the "pro" features, but will commit to buying "pro" anway if Synergy works in Wayland when Fedora 24 comes out. Anyone else?

[lig]

@acd-rht I already have "pro":) And I feel lack of wayland support and lack of the several other features…

[Djhg2000]

I'm using Synergy as a system critical component on my gaming rig. Windows 7 runs in a VM and has no physical mouse or keyboard. Up until now I've used Xorg on the host system but now that I'm running Wayland the only way to control my Windows 7 VM is through a virtual desktop connection (local access is not possible due to the forwarded graphics card).

When I run "synergys -f" and try to cross the screen border I just get "WARNING: can't leave screen".

Since it turns out Wayland runs much smoother than Xorg on my machine and enables a lot of new functionality I'm very reluctant to switch back to Xorg. With Fedora 24 set to release in 48 days I think it's time we consider this an urgent issue.

[thegass]

+1
wayland is pretty stable on my machines (fedora 23,24) but i cannot use it because of synergy.

[bcdonadio]

+1
Wayland is working flawlessly on my machines with Fedora 24, and the only application that's holding me back from switching to it is Synergy. The mouse actually seems to work, however there's no cursor showing. The keyboard, however, doesn't work.

[rboati]

+1

[preactive]

+1

Same as bcdonadio.

Switched back from wayland to standard gnome and worked like normal.

[tbporter]

To add to this, Fedora 25 is going to use Wayland by default.
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1615

[trejjam]

Today my Gnome by default switch to Wayland (ArchLinux), and also Synergy not work correctly

[ghost]

Switched from Ubuntu (Unity 7) to Arch (Gnome 3) and got the same problems.
Synergy just crashes when i try to leave the screen.

[cekstam]

+1

[pierrre]

@cekstam please don't post a useless "+1"
You notify EVERYONE on this issue by email !
Just add a "thumbs up" emoji on the first message.

@nlyan @nbolton I suggest you lock the conversation because:

• Synergy doesn't support Wayland yet
• More and more distributions are migrating to Wayland
• I don't think we will receive any interesting feedback until Synergy supports Wayland.
• All the previous comments are useless "+1"
• I'm bored to receive useless notifications

Thank you.

[neilmayhew]

However, it's clear from all the comments that Wayland is becoming more
and more urgent, and I think the developers need to know that people are
definitely wanting this. So I'd recommend still allowing people to give
a "thumbs up" as Pierre suggests.

[neilmayhew]

@pierrre You can always mute the thread, too

[gregsheremeta]

... or use Gmail filters.

@nbolton Can we get an actual update please?

[pierrre]

@neilmayhew I subscribed to this issue because I want to receive useful message about this Issue.
Not because I want to receive an endless list of "+1"

[Djhg2000]

@pierre That's great but locking this will only make things worse. It's either this or mass duplication of the issue, just look at what happens on other issue trackers. If you don't like it you can always mute the thread.

While we're at it this issue still affects me. I have purchased a USB switch to electronically move the mouse and keyboard instead until Wayland support arrives.

[Ironchunk]

Hi,

i would appreciate a Wayland Support. I've serious problems with Fedora 25 and Synergy Enterprise :(

Thx and best regards

[theburn]

Fedora 25 Released , and use Wayland default.
Synergy cannot used .

[2016-11-28T09:03:25] DEBUG2: writef(CALV)
[2016-11-28T09:03:25] DEBUG2: wrote 4 bytes
[2016-11-28T09:03:25] DEBUG2: msg from "win-pc": CALV
[2016-11-28T09:03:25] DEBUG2: msg from "win-pc": CNOP
[2016-11-28T09:03:25] DEBUG2: no-op from

[brianjmurrell]

So as much as I dislike being nagged by a bunch of +1s I have emphasise here that getting Synergy working with Wayland is of much more importance than some of the eye-candy whizzy-bang features that have been coming out in the latest releases.

Let's get basic functionality working before we start working on the lipstick and mascara folks.

[gregsheremeta]

@nbolton Please provide an update? Are you working on this? Do you need community help?

[preactive]

I support Greg's sentiment with offering community support. Or is there
support we try to garner from efforts like
https://github.com/RealVNC/wayland-developer-preview ?

On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 5:41 AM, Greg Sheremeta [e-mail]
wrote:

@nbolton https://github.com/nbolton Please provide an update? Are you
working on this? Do you need community help?

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[klm46]

come on guys. i just bought a license, and i read this. Is there any news?

[gregsheremeta]

@klm46 I also own a license. Can we get refunds? lol

[ghost]

^ Literally this @nbolton @nlyan.
People rely on this program to work.
People expect that if they pay for something that it's usable.

Then they see this github ticket with three shocking factors:

1. Open since late 2014
2. Priority: 3/4 (degraded(!) from 2/4 in September)
3. No feedback or updates from the devs at all.

This ticket should be promoted to at least 2-next if not 1-urgent and ANY developer should give some kind of feedback/updates. I know that you guys are busy and that there are 800+ open tickets, but this is not a 'nice to have' feature. This is about compatibility with a display server that more and more distros start shipping as their default.

So please finally tell us if you'll ever start working on it or if you don't care at all.
This might save us hundreds of further comments filled with speculations, hate, +1's and close-requests.

Thanks in advance.

[jsight]

I'm not sure that I understand the vitriol. Can't you just switch back to X until this is implemented?

I'm sure that it isn't a particularly easy thing to get right.

[klm46]

@jsight your answer is BS, sorry... just switch back to X... lol

EDIT: this is also not a feature, its an broken (main)function. it was an feature-request since wayland was not default at some distris. now its never ever an feature request

[mallardduck]

Hello @nbolton & @XinyuHou,

I'm wondering if either of you can provide any sort of official statement on the current status of Wayland support or the plans to support it. I know one you created this bug yourself, but that was 2 years ago when Wayland wasn't as common.

It's now almost 2017 and Wayland is becoming a requirement for certain users, do you guys intend to update Synergy for Wayland or will proper Linux support die off with X11? I like to believe that you guys intended to continue supporting Synergy on Linux, but until one of you can provide an official statement (and/or roadmap) we're left to assume the worst.

Thanks

[dolphin85204]

I have to chime in agreement with @mallardduck The "trivial" workaround of reverting to X11 is problematic in some instances. Example, I upgraded to Fedora 25, Wayland default. Reverted to X11 after encountering the problem. Once I reverted, I started having display problems with my Eclipse IDE. After a few hours of dinking around trying to resolve the issue I reverted back to Wayland. Quite frankly my ability to code supersedes keyboard and mouse sharing.

I have no problems paying for the product, but the silence on this matter speaks volumes. One final comment, Synergy is unique in the keyboard/mouse application universe in that it supports Linux, the other products don't. If Linux support lags, then you are weakening your position in the marketplace, keeping up with the technology should matter. I too am considering a hardware solution, sadly.

[fftux]

I too experienced issues reverting to X11 after doing Fedora 25 upgrade. They eventually went away and I'm able to use synergy, but I do not feel that this is a solution.

I too have no problem paying for good software, but paying customers should be provided support. I pay to contribute back, since I'm not much of a dev.

[aairey]

Wayland is working pretty well. That's why it is the default now on many distro's.

It is definitely a bug with Synergy.
"Switching back to X" might be a workaround, but it definitely is not a solution.
Synergy would be the only reason to switch back to X, how does that look?
On top of that, Wayland will become the default on all distros soon.

You will have many more users complaining then, than now.

So please, let a dev(s) try this out himself and investigate the issue.

[polarathene]

Although there is no response on these issues I've contacted support and have some good news:

Synergy will indeed support Wayland in 2017, as we're working hard on this!

[StephanMeijer]

I am using Fedora and I'd love support for Wayland or XWayland.

[kd5ftn]

Also a user of Fedora 25 and Synergy Pro customer. Wayland support is important to me.

[nlyan]

Stay tuned.

[cuviper]

There are now separate issues for client #5802 and server #5803.

[hertzg]

priority-1-urgent

[circuit-breaker]

Yeah, not really interested after getting shafted on the whole 'lifetime access to releases for a fixed one time fee' to then be told I have to pay again... for SSL and now support? I don't need or want support. I want what I paid for. You guys pulled a bait & switch. Sorry for being OT.

[polarathene]

@circuit-breaker what are you on about? You can have the basic plan and should be fine. It specifically lists what the Pro plan offers, SSL and priority support. That has little to do with Wayland support unless they place that on Pro which I could understand being upset about.

Going to assume you paid for Basic before the Pro plan came out with SSL? If that were the case then SSL was a new feature not available to you when you got Basic? You still have lifetime access to future releases, you're still getting all the bug fixes for what functionality you initially paid for, and you'll likely get Wayland support when available. If SSL and pririoty support interest you then upgrade? You don't have to pay full price again to my understanding.

[circuit-breaker]

No, I specifically paid (donated I think?) with 2 different accounts for 2 copies of the SSL version.

I was not aware that I'll still get access to those builds without paying more. I dug through your site looking for an explanation of what was going on and what it meant for existing paid users, as well as the forums and what the users were saying - found nothing concrete..

If this is stated as such on the site, or was rather when I was looking - my mistake. But I felt I exhaustively looked, and like I said - nothing except users complaining in the forum, with no-one clearing the air. Didn't leave me thinking I'd retain access. Plenty of others echoed the same sentiment, just confusion because of the changeup. I get that you guys are growing and want to see you make it, I just felt chafed.

Sorry for the misinformed rant.

[polarathene]

@circuit-breaker just to clarify, I am a user like yourself with a paid license/donation, I am not a part of Symless/Synergy nor support :)

I'm not sure what you may have seen when you paid, I believe I got the Basic version at a lower price than it is currently and before a Pro version with SSL existed. An e-mail later let me know about it and that it was in a different account tier which I could pay a little more to upgrade to if I wanted to enjoy the SSL feature. Visiting the site now, there is a pricing page that shows very clearly what you get between the two versions.

From what I understand, you do not need to pay anything at all, the source code is fully available. You're just paying for convienience of an installer but could compile Synergy for yourself if you want to spend the time setting that up for your platform, others have packages. In addition your payment/donation helps support the development of Synergy so bugs get fixed.

Prior to this from what I understand, there was difficulty getting development done for new features like Wayland or bugs fixed along with maintenance updates due to lack of funds. I'm all for supporting open-source projects financially when they're providing me with great value.

I suggest you contact their support channels via e-mail, as a paid user your account information should see you receive a response(I did with Wayland when there was little information for a long time on these git issues). It'll be more effective than posting such comments on unrelated issues, especially ones like this which has 36 participants(and perhaps more subscribed) that get pinged when someone comments on this issue.

[jamesgreenblue]

https://twitter.com/Symless/status/824994156871311360

[DarrellDuane]

Is there a Nightly Build we can test? Tried synergy-v1.8.8-rc1-5ae3177 and synergy-wayland-stable-fe741fc with no luck on client side.

[nlyan]

@DarrellDuane not yet. We will post here when there are betas for Linux users to try.

[Quip11]

Just upgraded to Fedora 25; everything works but Synergy. I'll fall back to X.org until it's fixed.

[renatovico]

@Quip11 same here

[raynix]

Waiting on this to use Synergy as client on my fedora laptop.

[cbarrerang]

Really looking forward to this as I can't wait to ditch X11

[pierrre]

@raynix @cbarrerang very interesting comments, thank you

@ moderators can you read this https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/NoMeToo
and enforce it ?

[klm46]

regarding to https://twitter.com/Symless/status/824994156871311360

what`s the process?

[Kirk-H]

I can confirm that Wayland still passes invisible cursor. Any update on this and when a fix will be available? I do not want to use X11/Xorg as wayland has resolved may display / window management issues I was seeing in Xorg on 3 screen display setup.

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[davidkirwan]

Hmm I have about half my Linux devices running with Wayland, and its starting to hurt as synergy is not working :( looking forward to support being added! <3

[preactive]

Depending on your distro but here is what I did on Fedora 25 to roll back

https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/96134/how-can-i-set-xorg-as-a-default-on-fedora-25/?answer=96135#post-id-96135

uncomment one line in /etc/gdm/custom.conf
uncomment this: #WaylandEnable=false

Then when support for wayland from synergy drops down to us you can flick it back just as easy.

[techgnosis]

Just chiming in for support of wayland. I'm running Fedora 25 and was forced to drop back to X. It's not a huge deal right now but it will be in like a year. So...no rush, great product, but we really do need Wayland support.

[aairey]

uncomment one line in /etc/gdm/custom.conf
uncomment this: #WaylandEnable=false

You can also just select "GNOME with X.Org" from the (GDM) login screen.
It will remember your choice for the next login session.

No need to manually edit configuration files.

On Thu 8 Jun 2017, 02:27 James Musselwhite [e-mail] wrote:

Just chiming in for support of wayland. I'm running Fedora 25 and was
forced to drop back to X. It's not a huge deal right now but it will be in
like a year. So...no rush, great product, but we really do need Wayland
support.

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[preactive]

Unless you have a limited user, passwordless, autologin account. ;)

On Thu, Jun 8, 2017 at 12:30 AM, aairey [e-mail] wrote:

uncomment one line in /etc/gdm/custom.conf
uncomment this: #WaylandEnable=false

You can also just select "GNOME with X.Org" from the (GDM) login screen.
It will remember your choice for the next login session.

No need to manually edit configuration files.

On Thu 8 Jun 2017, 02:27 James Musselwhite [e-mail]
wrote:

Just chiming in for support of wayland. I'm running Fedora 25 and was
forced to drop back to X. It's not a huge deal right now but it will be
in
like a year. So...no rush, great product, but we really do need Wayland
support.

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[RusDavies]

To state the obvious, Fedora 26 is now GA and uses Wayland by default. We're nearly 3 years into this bug, yet no fix in sight.

Some transparency into your prioritization may have helped. Instead, given the history to date, I have have to assume this bug will never get fixed, which now leads me to give up on Synergy.

It was fun while it lasted. All the best. Bye.

[phoenixdigital]

I bought this about 5 years ago and haven't used Synergy in over 6 months due to lack of Wayland support.

Is the an alternative product out there paid/free to buy yet?

[gregsheremeta]

Everyone, they are working on it. I've seen a working demo several months ago. I pinged them on twitter for an update (they don't pay attention to github)

[ghost]

@gregsheremeta

Everyone, they are working on it.

We know.
We got a "Stay Tuned" (here and on Twitter) by nlyan over 6 Months ago.
They also told us that the client is already finished and they'd just need a few more weeks in January to complete the server-side. (https://twitter.com/Symless/status/824994156871311360)

It would be nice to get a bit more transparency from the devs.

If they can't manage to get it to work that's no shame, but nobody of the OSS-community will sit down and write a wayland PR if they keep telling us that they're "working on it".

[gregsheremeta]

"Not yet, unfortunately! We're looking into it in the future though :)"

https://twitter.com/Synergy_App/status/889477634647838721

@sn0w perhaps it really is vaporware ...

[gregsheremeta]

https://twitter.com/Synergy_App/status/890109298151493633
@Synergy_App
Replying to @gregsheremeta
Unfortunately the plan changed and something else took priority. That can happen when you only have 2 devs.

So they are not actually working on it.

Anyone interested on working on it? I'm terrible at C ... :laughing:

[rpjohnst]

If they're going to charge money for it, I don't imagine people will be too interested in working on it for free...

[gregsheremeta]

fair point

[aairey]

Unless the developer gets paid?
Maybe time to set up a bounty for this issue? :)

On Wed, 26 Jul 2017 at 22:31 Greg Sheremeta [e-mail]
wrote:

fair point

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[raynix]

Or even crowd fund this feature.

On Jul 27, 2017 9:43 PM, "aairey" [e-mail] wrote:

Unless the developer gets paid?
Maybe time to set up a bounty for this issue? :)

On Wed, 26 Jul 2017 at 22:31 Greg Sheremeta [e-mail]
wrote:

fair point

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[RusDavies]

Actually, a bounty seems like a fair way of dealing with this. If the devs want to scope and cost the feature, then I'd happily chip in.

[cadesalaberry]

Found some updates on #Weyland support:

[arquio]

Any alternative?

[coolhandlance]

Fwiw, Synergy client on Fedora 25 and now 26 works perfectly with Wayland with the proprietary nVidia drivers for my GTX 1050 (Mac OS server).

Perhaps this is a nouveau driver issue.

[cuviper]

I believe Fedora still uses Xorg with the proprietary nVidia drivers.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WaylandByDefault

The code will automatically fall back to Xorg in cases where wayland is unavailable (like nvidia).

[ph03]

Any news on this, given that Ubutnu17.10 will default to wayland and so synergy 1.x will not work anymore? Does the synergy 2.0-betaX support wayland now?

[tswfi]

Symless is probably aware of this but I will leave these here anyways for reference for others searching information about this:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1483499
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Mutter/RemoteDesktop

Will probably take a while untill this is mainstream and can really be used but looks promising anyways.

[polarathene]

@ph03 Synergy 2 should have Wayland support on release from what I've been told when inquiring about the beta which doesn't support it. Beta also requires online sign in connection iirc, not a requirement on release.

@tswfi Mutter would be specific to Gnome would it not? I'd hope that they plan to support Wayland better, it'd probably have to go through different wayland compositor support I guess(would be great if wayland dealt with these kinda of protocols without requiring compositors to provide their own implementations, anything not considered secure gets offloaded to each compositor though, instead of having some sort of flag for acknowledging protocol features that aren't secure to enable them..).

If this is how Synergy approaches the Wayland support, I hope they're clear on how well that support is(DE specific) rather than claiming full Wayland support if that's not the case.

---

Probably useful for everyone, here is quote from support e-mail:

And for pricing, we're still working on the details. We'll be offering Synergy 2 to Synergy 1 users for no charge sometime into the new year, probably around March 2018. The discounted price now is for early access, whether you want to try beta or simply want the full version in November.

[lig]

@polarathene Hope it will be a free upgrade for 1.x users. I'm not going to pay for the same feature twice.

[CapOM]

+1 , Ubuntu 17.10 released today, is Wayland by default

[hmic]

Feature needed as of today.
Ubuntu 17.10 will be big in userbase within days - expect some noise!

Maybe someone not associated with symless, which seem quite useless in this regard, will have a look finally...

[wiltonlazary]

Ubuntu 17.10 + wayland

[Ernillew]

Really feature need yesterday, not today.

[vegbrasil]

Just installed Ubuntu 17.10 and Synergy does not work...

[ph03]

Can someone with Ubuntu 17.10 verify if Synergy 1.8 works if Gnome is started with X (not wayland) by choosing a different session / using GDM instead of LightDM? Just want to be sure I don't regret upgrading Ubuntu because of this..

[aairey]

Fedora already uses Wayland for more than a year. And synergy has never
worked on Wayland.

Yes, this is a possible workaround to keep using X11. But no definitive
solution.

On Fri, 20 Oct 2017, 12:48 Janick Martinez Esturo, [e-mail]
wrote:

Can someone with Ubuntu 17.10 verify if Synergy 1.8 works if Gnome is
started with X (not wayland) by choosing a different session / using GDM
instead of LightDM? Just want to be sure I don't regret upgrading Ubuntu
because of this..

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[aensley]

_Replying to https://github.com/symless/synergy-core/issues/4090#issuecomment-338173218 by @ph03:_

I'm on Ubuntu 17.10, and was distressed when Synergy didn't work. I absolutely need it! I was able to switch to using X.org on the login screen by clicking the settings icon :gear:. That did fix the problem for me, but I really would like to be able to use Wayland. Synergy is the only thing I have requiring X.

[DeftNerd]

This just finally made me give up on Synergy. I stuck around through the nightmare of the commercialization of their software because it was still functional. Now, even with a 3 year warning, they can't handle a major software release by the largest distro.

[brunosantosnasajon]

Is there a good alternative for Synergy?

[DeftNerd]

Nothing that works with Wayland at the moment, AFAIK.

I'm going with a hardware solution that's even cheaper than the software license. There is a little button that I can put on some space above my number pad that'll switch my Keyboard & Mouse to another computer.

IOGEAR 2 Computer 4-Port USB 2.0 Peripheral Sharing Switch, GUS402

[brianjmurrell]

IOGEAR 2 Computer 4-Port USB 2.0 Peripheral Sharing Switch, GUS402

I'm not sure I see how that compares (or is even relevant) to what Synergy does. It's a USB switch.

There is a little button that I can put on some space above my number pad that'll switch my Keyboard & Mouse to another computer.

That's not really the same solution as synergy as it lets you only view one of the machines at a time. It's also more klunky to have to press buttons to switch computers than it is to just move your mouse to the computer you want to have input focus.

[cuviper]

Can we please stop treating this like a discussion forum? I'm subscribed here so I can follow any actual Synergy updates for Wayland, which I remain hopeful for...

[seaweeduk]

Updated my ubuntu today and disappointed to see this isn't working still. Running xorg again for now but I really hope this can be fixed soon.

[gregsheremeta]

They are not going to do it. Read this: https://twitter.com/gregsheremeta/status/890280333849112578

I asked them to open source what they have -- fuckin' crickets lol. Hopefully they stop advertising / claiming Linux support.

[easytarget]

@gregsheremeta
Try: https://github.com/symless/synergy-core/tree/wayland

• no commits since march.. but better than nothing.

[aensley]

_Replying to https://github.com/symless/synergy-core/issues/4090#issuecomment-338468929 by @gregsheremeta:_

[gregsheremeta]

Ah, awesome. For some reason I thought they had closed stuff because they are charging for it. I'm not sure how their revenue model works, got confused.

[It's also somewhat distressing that they are monitoring this thread (hence the reply from them today) but they haven't posted any updates here.]

[gilbertw1]

You guys do realize that Synergy fundamentally undermines most of the security model built into Wayland and it is unlikely that it'll ever be successfully ported to Wayland without the Gnome guys building in explicit support making it possible.

You should probably be redirecting most of these requests to the people working on Wayland and Gnome. In it's current state based on my understanding a proper port of synergy to Wayland is not possible without explicit added support by the compositor (Gnome).

[jsight]

@gilbertw1 That has been my understanding as well, but I really wish that the symless people would just be clear about this. Having said that, I think that work is underway upstream to get this kind of thing fully supported. Take a look at Pipewire if you want to see the details:

https://github.com/PipeWire/pipewire
https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/06/20/fedora-workstation-26-and-beyond/

[mcg]

@jsight putting on my conspiracy hat, they aren't being clear because no Wayland support will cut into 2.0 sales.

[jsight]

I guess that I don't get how someone could buy the product version now without already knowing about this limitation.

[gilbertw1]

My guess is that they, like many watching Wayland, assumed that this type of functionality would be worked out and supported in some form by the time Wayland made it to prime time. Unfortunately, it's here now and a whole slew of apps just flat out aren't possible to migrate or replicate in Wayland. Also unfortunately, it looks like that won't be changing for a while.

[michaelwheatland]

I just purchased Synergy which advertises compatability with Ubuntu.
Very disappointed that this program doesn't work with the default Ubuntu Desktop Manager. Is support for Weyland coming soon?

[ppaalanen]

As far as I understand what Synergy does (sorry, never used it myself), there are two very different sides to the Wayland story.

I can certainly confirm that there is no standard Wayland interface at this time for injecting input events into a Wayland display server. We have not seen such proposals in Wayland upstream either. The major problem is how to authenticate and authorize a Wayland client that wants to do this. Right now I can imagine two ways to inject input into a Wayland display server: use root privileges and /dev/uinput, or some server specific method (I assume e.g. GNOME has some for remote control).

OTOH, reading input events from a Wayland display server might not be a big deal depending on how you want to do it, it is already necessary for virtual machine frontends etc. and that has seen some development in upstream Wayland. But if you want to do it without a normal application window, you cannot for now in a generic way.

If Synergy runs through Xwayland instead of being a Wayland application, I would assume it is able to inject input events to the Xwayland X server, but those events will not be forwarded to the Wayland display server. I guess this has two consequences:

• Wayland applications cannot receive the injected input
• the injected input cannot affect the input devices, e.g. they cannot move (or create) the real pointer cursor

[wirecat]

@skela I think there are some kinks(https://github.com/symless/synergy-core/issues/6196), but it is mostly functional. Version 1.8.8 works reasonably well on Wayland as well.

e: I should clarify and state that I am running Arch Linux which may have a lot to do with this operating at all or any bugs I'm experiencing.

[skela]

@wirecat thx, last time i tried synergy on wayland, it did not work at all, and I'm also using Arch (Well antergos). Arch Linux / Antergos as my server, and MacOS High Sierra as the client.

[danielheaton]

@skela Just installed the newest version (1.8.8-stable-258cb2) on Fedora 27 with Gnome 3. The mouse would not show, but I could type and copy/paste. I had to disable Wayland for it to work properly.

[skela]

Right, thx @RadiogenicHeat , I guess I will wait :D

[fenrig]

Still not working? Using ARCH with all packages recent

[btaens]

Nope, still not working. At the end of 2017.

[sgala]

I'm seeing this also, I need to start ubuntu 17.10 with "wayland over xorg" to have synergy sort of working (no dock, some other problems).

[daveboutcher]

I wonder if we could get a definitive update on Wayland support....in Synergy 1 or 2. Not having Wayland support in 2018 is kind of a deal-breaker for using Synergy with Linux. I know there is a workaround (turn off Wayland), but that's not really a viable alternative for me.

[phoenixdigital]

If you or anyone finds a good solution for Win <-> Linux instances please
post here.

I used to use synergy quite a bit and have really missed it over the last
year since switching to the more recent Fedora releases with Wayland at
stock.

On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 8:40 AM, Tony [e-mail] wrote:

I'm in the same boat as @daveboutcher https://github.com/daveboutcher
-- if three years isn't enough time to support Wayland I have to assume
it's time to start looking at alternatives. It's unfortunate, I really
liked using Synergy all these years, and even though I purchased 2.0 with
the hopes this would at least be somewhat functional, I don't really have
any other option than to start researching alternatives.

—
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
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[polarathene]

• I assume Wayland support is waiting on protocol or something to let Synergy do it's thing otherwise require each compositor have it's own implementation?
• Not sure about what the issues with Wayland are, Synergy still not being transparent about barriers they've run into?

For those looking for alternatives with guest VMs(assuming they run Wayland, I'm more interested in Wayland as a host) or running Wayland as a host, you might be able to use QEMU/KVM(not a switch, but hypervisor KVM), and something like evdev with a key combination to redirect input between host and guest. It's a common way to handle input for linux host, windows guests on r/VFIO these days.

If you need it for going across several actual machines, I guess with Wayland you're out of luck? I guess Wayland users/customers are more of a minority though to Synergy and their current changes to monetize the product is working out better for them. Wayland support is likely to come eventually, but until development elsewhere has gotten to a point that it's worthwhile for Synergy devs to actually implement support for we're likely not going to see it as other features will be prioritized to cater to the wider user base needs.

It's odd though that there was some tweets/communications about the Wayland support getting in good shape some time ago and no updates since as to why progress halted?

Looked briefly at the repo, noticed a Wayland branch here no updates since March 2017. Earlier comments in this thread suggest keyboard input is working in Wayland on 1.8.8 and mouse uncertain but the mouse cursor visual just doesn't display?

[ppaalanen]

I still don't know what exactly is Synergy's use case, but I hope the below clarifies the obstacles in general a little. I hope I didn't guess wrong what the intended use is.

There are two completely different aspects to "Wayland support":

1. Running the UI application on a Wayland session, controlling whatever remote system.
2. Controlling a remote system that is running a Wayland session.

The latter can further be divided into roughly two cases:
2.1. The "remote" system being a VM where you are actually controlling the virtual machine as if it had real physical input and output devices, these being actually virtual remote devices.
2.2. The remote system being a normal user session where the remote control connection just introduces new input and hijacks the output, e.g. a helpdesk connecting to a user's machine.

Cases 1 and 2.1 are perfectly implementable as is, the Wayland features already exists at least as unstable standard interfaces. 2.1. does not actually concern Wayland at all.

Case 2.2 is the one that requires explicit support from each and every Wayland display server being remote controlled. There are no standard interfaces even proposed for this case yet. Each Wayland display server is going its own way here, e.g. offering an integrated RDP or other server, or not having implemented anything yet. In other words, as far as I have seen, the support in the display servers seems to be not introducing Wayland interfaces for it but implementing a suitable server directly.

I think it would be nice if the company behind Synergy would support these remote controlling features in the various display server projects or publicly propose whatever they think would be better. One thing is almost sure: one cannot anymore write a (proprietary) application to hijack a display server, like it was possible with X11. There is no central software component like Xorg to depend on for it.

As I said before, it is probably possible to run case 2.2 through Xwayland on the remote system, but it will not be able to control any Wayland-based applications on the remote and you likely have problems with a mouse cursor.

[CapOM]

I think a large set of users are interested in Case 1: Work station is running wayland and the remote is a mac or win laptop. This case does not even work despite being the easiest setup to support.

[cadesalaberry]

Given that this feature is the most requested by far it would be great to have an actual answer from the synergy-core dev team.

[nbolton]

We do plan on adding Wayland support to the next major version.

[nbolton]

We had previously prioritised Wayland support for Synergy when Ubuntu 17.10 made it the default. We had invested development time in developing Wayland support, but a short while later Ubuntu 18 was released and Wayland was no longer the default, so we decided to lower the priority. Due to the recent release of Ubuntu 21.04 and Fedora 34 where Wayland is being used by default, we are now reconsidering the priority. Unfortunately, we cannot promise anything at this time.