Synergy (software KVM) alternative

garyfritz

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I just discovered Synergy doesn't support Wayland. It's only been the default display protocol on RHEL and Debian and OpenSUSE for three freaking YEARS, and now it's default on Ubuntu too -- and they're just "looking at it" for a future release. Grumble.

What's the best alternative? I just need the KVM functionality, supporting at least RHEL8 and Windoze, but it would be nice to have other features like copy/paste &etc. Free is good but I'll pay a modest fee if it's worth it.

I see alternatives like Barrier &etc, but I don't see any mention of Wayland support, don't know which ones are good, etc.
 


Yes, Xorg is still available in RHEL8 and probably Debian. But some of us don't want to or don't have the option to use Xorg.

Wayland has been the default for 3 years on RHEL8 and Debian 10.

Default on Ubuntu for a year, since 21.04:
 
I never tried it out myself but I just installed Rocky Linux 8 and Debian 11, afterwards I installed Xfce4 on both. With Rhel8 Wayland was used and with Debian Xorg was still being used. I then reverted my vm's back to headless installs, then I install Gnome on both. When using Gnome on both Debian and Rocky Wayland is used, so for Rhel8 Wayland is the default but for Debian it looks like it depends on the DE whether Xorg or Wayland is used.
 
Interesting. The DebIan wiki says very clearly that Wayland is the default.
 
The DebIan wiki says very clearly that Wayland is the default.

Not exactly, Gary and welcome to linux.org :)

It says, in part

The Wayland session is built into GNOME and it should be an option in your display manager simply by having GNOME installed.

As this is the default Debian desktop environment, Wayland is used by default in Debian 10 and newer

However, you can see from here

https://wiki.debian.org/DesktopEnvironment#Desktop_Environment

... that Plasma, Xfce, LXDE and MATE are also official flavours.

Plasma requires a package

plasma-workspace-wayland

to be installed manually for Wayland to be used, the rest of the DEs do not yet support Wayland.

Further there are other, community-based releases including Cinnamon, which is Xorg.

I run installs with GNOME, Xfce, Plasma, and Cinnamon as the DEs, and only GNOME has Wayland, but you can still choose Xorg with it at login.

Cheers

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
 
I understand other options are available. But "Wayland is used by default in Debian 10 and newer" sure sounds like "Wayland is the default" to me??

I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting. OK, I can get Wayland working with Plasma, but I can't use that. I already have Wayland, in GNOME, and I'm required to use that. What I'm looking for is a Synergy-like KVM that works WITH Wayland and GNOME.
 
Have you tried Barrier?
 
No, but I'm going to try it. They say "Barrier does not support Wayland" but people say it works with a few glitches, like invisible mouse sprite. There is a bounty to support further development and it's forked off to a new project.



 
  • Wayland Support
I also found a forum topic, but seems the devopers haven't responded much.

2. Across works in a X Window session only, but does not in a Wayland session. (We will support Wayland someday.)
 
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