Is this project dead ? #2199

Edit: and the Wayland discussions are shut down and closed, with loads of problems outstanding.

The tracking for wayland issues is here: deskflow/deskflow#7499

All of the remaining wayland issues are either waiting on a portal to do something or a specific DE's portal implementation to add support for Input Capture / Remote Desktop . This is the same for Input-Leap.

You can get deskflow releases from the releases page or by using one of the large download buttons in the readme

Just checked out the Deskflow repo, and of course was interested in the Wayland aspect, first link I click on for Wayland and it's telling me I can get wayland support by downloading paid components from Synergy.

Where did you see this that is just incorrect and should be fixed.

Where did you see this that is just incorrect and should be fixed.

Two of the pinned comments on the top of the discussions page offer paid synergy as a route to success with wayland, and the 'relationship' page linked from the main repository suggests purchasing a license too.

Ultimately it doesn't really matter as now I understand the provenance of the project, it's an easy decision to stay away. I'm going to attempt to come up with a solution involving sunshine/moonlight and/or rdp.

Shame as I had some hopes for input-leap , but seems it was not to be.

Two of the pinned comments on the top of the discussions page offer paid synergy as a route to success with wayland, and the 'relationship' page linked from the main repository suggests purchasing a license too.

Synergy supports Deskflow financially, i.e. paying for developers to work on the project, contributing code upstream first, paying for bounties, and so on. You do not need to buy a Synergy license to use any part of Deskflow, it simply helps to fund development of Deskflow.

I don't trust Synergy / Symless , they burned all their goodwill as far as I'm concerned. Looks like they're still doing it.

That is sad. I have spent half of my life (the last two decades) contributing to open source through Synergy both firsthand and with the various developers I have employed, so it's difficult to read about people having this view. I wonder if you may be referring to Synergy 2 being unsuccessful. If so, all Synergy 2 customers were given the choice of either a free upgrade to Synergy 3 or a full refund. All Synergy 2 customers still have access to Synergy 1, which we are still actively developing and maintaining. One of the misconceptions about Synergy 1 was that it "went proprietary" which is not the case; we simply charge for the binaries we build and tech support. You are free to build your own binaries and always will be.

If there is still something unresolved, I am of course happy to help you with that.

I'm a synergy customer since a long time.

To be honest, my view was that synergy could have been far more open with its Wayland support development progress.

Frustrating GitHub threads were open for years without any constructive communication happening, and were eventually closed (clear sign of a problem).

Maybe I'm missing a big part of the information, but it seems that the community had to, on its own :

1. guess what you guys were doing on the upstream front where the protocol battles where being discussed and fought.
2. organize bounties and brainstorming and projects, and bug fixes, and eventually something that will be useful for everyone.

Symless/Synergy could have communicated more on their plans & capacities to participate with the community, and assist or fund the development of every infrastructure bricks needed for Synergy's Wayland support.

But you guys are still cool

What im saying is if it was fixed in input-leap (or barrier) we can backport the fix to deskflow , we just have to find it. Also you can use deskflow with input-leap(barrier) client / server as well

This problem doesn't happen in input-leap or barrier, so maybe you could check why there works?

Yes

if it was fixed in input-leap (or barrier) we can backport the fix to deskflow.

Thank you!

As a programmer this is really annoying but I still need a KVM. I was about to go back to barrier, but because I've found this workaround with the ' " in my IDE, I will keep using Deskflow and wait for a fix since is the only project active.

PR are welcome on deskflow if you happen to find it before i get to it.

Thank you for all your work @shymega !

My UAC screens are disabled due to the "never notify" setting, so I suspect it's something to do with that.

Deskflow is a bit easier to build but since it will use vcpkg to build all the depends, we also have a continuous build so you don't have build yourself to get the newest version. but yeah all software development is horrible on windows for a few reasons.

Yeah C++ on Windows is absolutely a nightmare, so I totally get it. Only after years of ignoring this clipboard bug I worked up the patience to download the repo and build it, it took an entire afternoon but in the end I can't even debug it because CLion fails to read the CMake settings. And I bet, even if it worked, I probably couldn't debug it in user mode, or some other issue would pop up I'm sure...

I'm glad it's easier with Deskflow, I could try the installed version but all the same issues would remain, plus as I said I just can't get used to it after Barrier/IL's perfect GUI. I loved the simplicity of it and its entire core idea was it removed the unnecessary bloat from all the other apps.

No one bailed. I'm the sole active dev now, and trying my best to keep it alive.

@nbolton I tried them all over the years including that one. As I said, Barrier was the one I landed on as the least-bad choice; they all have some quirky bugs or UI and there's a million different projects, and suggesting yet another one unfortunately feeds precisely into the issues I described. Lan-mouse doesn't even support clipboard sharing. But, I do want to stress I'm not complaining at you, and thank you for trying to help.

I gave up and moved to Deskflow. After 18 hours of battling with MSVC I managed to compile it in CLion, modified the UI, and now behaves and feels pretty much the same as Barrier/IL. @sithlord48 if you guys would like, I can open a post detailing the building steps I narrowed down for compiling with CLion.

your more then welcome to start a discussion about it if you find the build instructions we have to be lacking.

Yes i would suggest you use / contribute to deskflow instead.

Cunningham's law

'Slander' is the more appropriate term here.

I think given Deskflow is making rapid progress in decluttering the codebase, and working on CISP, this is a good step forward, and we should look forward to Deskflow to set the upstream 'stage'. But that's my personal opinion, and not that of the Input Leap project. So, overall, props to you and @nbolton for keeping the Synergy codebase alive, and good luck in the future.

I hope to continue work on my hybrid KVM switch, Continuity, but continue to run into issues with pre-boot environments. I think a small dongle might be necessary for video/keyboard matters, unfortunately.

:-)

@shymega - esp. given some of the vitrol & frankly ridiculous statements above, I wanted to thank you for your contributions over the years, and to specifically say that it's really mature of you - and extremely helpful to users like myself - to point folks to other projects when you feel your time is wrapping up here, rather than just go silent.

So, thank you & take care.

@m10d I didn't see your comment, as I unsubscribed from all Input Leap issues, but I really am grateful for your kind words.

It means a lot, but I am unfortunately no longer wanting to continue with Input Leap. I have tried to reach out to @p12tic via IRC, with no luck, so I don't know what the future of this project is.

It feels like a repetition of Barrier, and I can only hope @sithlord48 and @nbolton can make software KVMs a success on cross-platforms

Should be fine with win10 + and mac os 12 +

Its on linux that support really depends on the distro and its version of libportal involved if your using wayland and if you have installed via flatpak or native package. (flatpaks use portals)

What you can do for example is install deskflow on windows and then input-leap on linux machine where deskflow is not working. Or if you wanted for for what ever reason use Xp you could install a version of synergy that works on that and connect to it via deskflow.

I still use the X Window System on Linux - I haven't switched to Wayland because I'm afraid things I depend on won't work as of yet. Linux Mint is built on top of a back-dated version of Ubuntu.

Besides trying the Deskflow/IL combo you suggest, I can't remember whether I installed Deskflow using flatpak or native last time. When I try it out again, if flatpak doesn't work, I'll install the native executable, assuming there is one for Ubuntu.

You have to had used the flatpak since there is not a proper version of libportal on ubuntu until 25.04. Fwiw i use deskflow on a kubuntu 24.04 (X11) client via the flatpak w/o issue.

Alot of people don't like alot of things

Edit: They should ask their distro for packages.

it looks like X11 support in Deskflow is on its way out.

There will come a time very soon when some distros will not provide the libs used to support X. In order to keep building for them the option to build without the X libs has to be offered. It does not mean we plan to remove them soon.

In distros support for X11 sessions will be going away. Gnome is dropping them in 50 and KDE will also at some point. Other DE will never support them (cosmic, hyperland). The X11 dev's have left X11 for wayland so its only a matter of time until X sucumbs to too much bit-rot. Some distros will do their best to keep it working. They should be just fine building the X parts of deskflow while they still exist. But one day yes the X support will be removed. Do not worry even then you can always use the last version of deskflow / input-leap whatever that your X11 using distro supports. With it you will still be able to connect to other clients / server running newer versions of the software. Since our network protocol is both forward and backward compatible.

Deskflow to share mouse and keyboard to a seccond X11 seat on the same computer... which means it's useless to me.

@miranda i forgot to document the display option in the gui config. that ability was not removed. I realized it was missing from the docs so i've added it. This i think is the part you need to use 1.24+ Check here If not i would be interested in what other option(s) are missing from the config, but let's continue this on the options discussion

There is no commercial version of Deskflow, please stop with the FUD.

Deskflow is a mess. This is a much more focused project if you want to keep things "suckless"

At least Deskflow works. No one - Barrier, Input Leap was fixing any major bugs from the projects they forked. They kept crashing for years with the same error codes, no solution even after creating multiple issues. Deskflow doesn't suffer from those problems, and is still open source - for anyone who's looking out for an answer.

There is no commercial version of Deskflow, please stop with the FUD.

Deskflow == Synergy so you can stop with the FUD. ;p

Deskflow is a mess. This is a much more focused project if you want to keep things "suckless"

At least Deskflow works. No one - Barrier, Input Leap was fixing any major bugs from the projects they forked. They kept crashing for years with the same error codes, no solution even after creating multiple issues. Deskflow doesn't suffer from those problems, and is still open source - for anyone who's looking out for an answer.

I left Deskflow for hardware i.e. it only works for some. I've got open tickets years old that aren't small annoyances but rather some big breakages if you use X11 and XScreens. There are some other issues open almost a decade that still dog it like copying URL's in English and Deskflow will paste Japanese Kanji.

Bugs, keyboard issues.. etc..

I've been working over a year to get things modernized before I can even look at fixing any of those things, fixing in place was not the easier path but was done so users (like myself) could have as little downtime as possible. Some bug fixes have happened and others are blocked by the code needing to be modernized first. While we are getting contributions from others its mostly just myself and nick who are actively working on the project. Hopefully as time goes one more contributors will be more active. With this will also come a more diverse set users testing and that in turn will also shake more bugs out..

Deskflow == Synergy so you can stop with the FUD. ;p

Deskflow is not Synergy anymore than Input-leap or Barrier In that they all started out as synergy due to their base and all of them have had code contributed at some point by Nick. Just about all the recent PR's in Input-Leap have come from people porting fixes from Deskflow some of them written by Nick. All the projects are related to one another. Instead of wasting our time on 4, We should all just be focusing on making one that works for everyone.