Great piece of software that does what I need!

[BennyB 1]

Hey @Nick Bolton, Just wanted to give a shout out to say thank you!

I work for a small Software Company (>30 Dev) and we just went thru a code refresh. I understand what it takes to constantly re-write code, updating because old code it out of date, so forth and so on. Anyone who doesn't understand this concept and complains is either ignorant to the fact that old code can only be supported for so long, or they just want to attention. There are many reasons that old code stops working. For one, anyone here of a new OS called Windows 10 or MacOS High Sierra? They add security features like SIP protection among others. That right there has ended the lives of a LOT of applications out in the world today.

I just wanted to say that from the days of pre-release v1, to now, I've used your software on and off and v2 for me is working just fine.

For the trolls that will undoubtedly respond to this, either go back to v1 for now and wait for v2 bugs to be worked or use v2 and send your bug reports and log file in to help them resolve the issues, or find another piece of software to do what you need. Constructive criticism is always welcomed, but negativity for the sake of being a jerk just isn't needed.

Thanks!

[eth0 15]

I wouldn't go so far as to say all complaints stem from ignorance or attention seeking. Of course there always will be jerks that don't add anything of value and just complain for the sake of making noise, but there are legitimate and reasonable complaints about Synergy 2 and in my opinion the lack of features is not even the top one.

Now, I can't speak on behalf of an unspecified number of people I don't even know, but I think much of the frustration with the new version is based on the fact that Symless released it as a stable version and promised a lot of features —many of them being improvements or fixes over features present in Synergy 1— but then had to postpone almost all of them. Synergy 2 had problems since day one and the dev team has always known that, but what put off a lot of people was getting wait a few months for version 2.1 or request a refund as the only two options instead of admitting that they maybe released it a bit too early.

New features and improvements are always welcome, but there's still skepticism about the cloud service dependency, for example. I myself still believe that coupling Synergy so tightly to an online component is a very bad idea considering its purpose is completely detached from having an Internet connection, but although I've been quite vocal about my concerns with this feature, I just went back to version 1.88 and will see how 2.1 fares when the guys release it. However, you can't expect everyone to just shrug it off.

There's been problems with Synergy not detecting the X display correctly and not providing any startup scripts for other init systems other than systemd in Linux hosts, not being able to connect to the cloud server which renders the whole setup unusable, losing the connection between machines in various scenarios and not being able to pick itself up again, unwantedly switching around the master computer for various reasons and a number of other issues. The dev team is aware of them and they'll be resolved eventually, but you can't deny that there are issues and that there is at least a visible portion of the userbase that is affected by them. Fortunately, it looks like they're heading in the right direction.

You can ask people to understand that development takes time and effort, and that developers are not perfect machines —I'm a developer myself— but you can't expect everyone to not complain at least. Just acknowledge the complaints and act accordingly if they are jerks about it.

 

Edited March 13, 2018 by eth0