Synergy is actually okay

I was wrong about Synergy

Last night after an hour or so of being defeated by Symless’ Synergy, I asked support for a refund, to which they replied with some useful information: there is an AUR package that installs Synergy in /opt. While not straightforward, there is a comment in the package thread that explained some key information by which I finally got everything working:

Run /opt/Synergy/synergy to open the GUI. Press ignore whenever an error pops up (it’s related to OS version not getting detected properly, which doesn’t matter as far as I can tell). Configure any way you like. Make sure the correct computer has the keyboard/mouse (you can change it under “Manage computers” menu by clicking the 3 dots right next to the computer you want to be the server and click “Keyboard and mouse computer”).

At this point Synergy should work as expected. If it doesn’t work check the logs in GUI and .local/state/Synergy/synergy.log. Don’t continue to the next steps until Synergy works properly.

Quit GUI. Kill the synergy-service process.

GUI is no longer needed unless you need to configure something from the GUI. So you can just remove ~/.config/synergy/ directory (note the lowercase “s”). Don’t remove the ~/.config/Synergy/ directory (note the uppercase “S”)

Now all you need is to run /opt/Synergy/synergy-service which you can either do directly or via a user unit systemctl –user enable –now synergy.service.