Synergy App

An honest admission from our team this year: right now the only person committing to Deskflow upstream from Synergy is one developer. One person is not enough long term. In 2026 we are working to make budget available for a new developer whose main focus will be Deskflow, Synergy 1, and the libraries our product depends on. That sits alongside the $5,950 we paid in 2025 to external contributors like Dustin Kaiser, Chris Rizzitello, laz-001, Denizhan Dakılır, BMagnu, and Vamshi Maskuri, plus the roughly 600 hours of in-house time our team spent on open source work (about 30% of our development time). We're also joining the Open Source Pledge. The full story, including a CVE the community recently found in our new IPC code, is in the link in the comments.

When KDE e.V. asked us for a quote for their annual report, we kept it simple: "KDE is part of our daily workflow. We test Synergy and Deskflow on it every day, so we rely on it being stable and well maintained. Supporting KDE is just backing something we use and depend on." There's also a direct thread. Chris Rizzitello, one of our leading day-to-day Deskflow contributors, is a KDE member. At Chris' request, we support KDE so the community he contributes from stays healthy. In 2025 that meant $1,000 to KDE e.V. and $500 to the GNOME Foundation, both ongoing annual commitments. The wider story (including the developers we funded directly) is in the link in the comments.

🎂 Happy birthday Synergy! Today marks the 25th birthday of Synergy The very first version of Synergy was committed to the code repository on 13 May 2001 by Chris Schoeneman (crs23). Fun fact: Chris originally hard coded Synergy to work with his main computer (audrey2) and his client (remote1), so you had to manually edit and recompile the source code to change the names. Only Linux was supported at this point (Windows and Mac came later on).

"Don't ghost me bro." That was the line that stuck with our team at FOSDEM 2025, from Daniel Thompson-Yvetot (co-founder of Tauri) during his talk on Compassionate Open Source Community Building. His shorthand: maintainers need to stay in daily contact with their community instead of disappearing between releases. We're carrying that lesson back into how we show up in the Deskflow community. Being in the room with the Qt, KDE, and GNOME folks who build the software we depend on is also part of how we decide where our money goes. In 2025, that decision added up to $7,450 paid to open source maintainers and foundations. The full breakdown (and the people behind the names) is in the link in the comments.

A practical note on how open source security works when it works. Recently, a member of the open source community found a CVE in the new IPC code we wrote for Deskflow. We are working on the fix now. Extra eyes on the code, problems surfaced and fixed in public, customers and community both protected. If you're evaluating tools that sit deep in your workflow (a keyboard and mouse sharing layer absolutely qualifies), this is the kind of process to look for: code in the open, contributors outside the vendor team reviewing it, and a clear path from upstream fix to the version you actually run. More on how Deskflow flows into Synergy 1 and Synergy 3, and where our 2025 funding went: https://lnkd.in/eeCE4xaa

For IT teams running Synergy 1 across a fleet: here's what our 2025 upstream work means for you in practice. We rewrote the IPC layer in upstream Deskflow, moving it from TCP to Qt local sockets, and replaced fragile log parsing between the Core and GUI with real IPC. On Windows, the daemon watchdog has been rewritten as a state machine using Qt. That work lands in Synergy 1 with the next beta. We continue to backport security fixes from Deskflow into Synergy 1, and important non-security fixes get backported between re-forks so you don't have to wait. We are preparing to re-fork from Deskflow to ship a new Synergy 1 beta, and we plan to keep doing this every year, which means a year of features, fixes, and platform improvements arrive together rather than trickling. Full rundown here: https://lnkd.in/eeCE4xaa

If you run Synergy on Linux under Wayland, the next beta is worth paying attention to. As part of our 2025 open source work, we improved the libei keyboard path with several fixes you'll feel day to day: - Added Hyper key handling - Disabled the meta modifier to fix a long-standing alt key bug - Switched to xkb_keymap_mod_get_mask where available, so modifier masks are read from your real keymap instead of hard-coded assumptions On the Windows mouse and cursor side, we added a cursor visibility retry, a small delay on desk leave to stop years of flicker, and we now enable MouseKeys at screen setup so accessibility users stop having their settings overwritten. If any of these have been papercuts in your multi-machine setup, check the full breakdown of what landed and what's coming next. https://lnkd.in/eeCE4xaa

If you haven’t used a tool in your daily setup, your opinion on it is noise. Most “reviews” come from people who installed it, clicked around for five minutes, and moved on. That’s not how software earns its place. This is what real usage looks like. Dr. Gerg shared how he runs Synergy across Windows and Linux, over LAN and WiFi, as part of his actual workflow. The kind of setup where anything flaky gets removed quickly. He also calls out support, which only matters once you depend on the tool. Worth reading if you care about how software holds up beyond the first impression: https://lnkd.in/ecNqDHu4

Most people juggle multiple computers. Most people tolerate the friction. Synergy removes it. Use one keyboard and mouse across all your machines. Move between them instantly. Copy and paste as if they were one system. No extra hardware. No switching. No interruption. 50% off today only. Use code: PADDY50 https://lnkd.in/e5Ms-G5V