As I upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04, I wanted to reinstall Synergy and that did not work out of the box as it was setup.

Looking around, it seemed that I'd have to get Synergy 3.x and I did.

The experience was fabulous. I installed it on my Ubuntu and then replaced the old version on my Windows box with version 3.x (I had some version 1.x which worked, but had all sorts of bugs).

The new installer does not require you to specify anything other than location of your screens. For the rest, it works 100% automatically. It's like all the computers know about the others without you having to do anything. I suppose it uses UDP messages or such. Either way, compared to the old way of doing things, that part was great!

Well... so now the Windows system goes to sleep after a little while, as expected (as the screensaver setup defines). It used to remain ON all the time before that, which was fine with me, but that's definitely a significant fix.

Another bug that was fixed, the key repeat feature would kill the connection. Only one key press / release would happen on Windows, then the mouse and keyboard were both back on Ubuntu (the main server). Now, it works as expected on both boxes.

The old system probably had some other bugs, but in general, it was great. Working as expected 99% of the time.

The new system, though, still have one bug. It sets the mouse pointer to the "Wait Cursor" and places that in the middle of the screen on the Windows box. It's not a big deal if I'm not looking at the screen, but well, I do do that quite a bit... which is why I have my systems setup that way.

Now, I found a way to fix that issue: open the Synergy app. (from the icon or your apps menu) fiddle with some settings back and forth and then close the window. You probably can log out and back in or restart too. I just did not have the time to test those other possible solutions. I only happened like 2 weeks after I started using the app. So I would imagine that it won't happen very often. I think this time, it happened because the computer went to sleep and when I wake it up, it took a bit of work to get back in. It was slow to reload the hibernated data.