YHK - yet another hacker news clone

First I remember hearing of deskflow, but I remember hearing about a synergy fork called "barrier". Is that not used anymore?

That "for free" link isn't accurate at all, it claims you have to compile Deskflow yourself, but on Deskflow's Github they offer binary releases.

I don't remember why Barrier was forked from Deskflow, but I've been using Barrier for many many years now. Now that I think of it, I do notice bugs, that maybe I should try out a new version to see if there are life improvements. E.g. with keyboard layouts, even when both systems are running Windows, the target system can be confused what character it should be outputing; and I need to hit "reload" to reconnect after returning one or both systems from standby, sometimes clipboard sharing also breaks.

As a paid Synergy user, there are tradeoffs (as you probably know). I'm willing to accept these for a side-by-side Mac workflow (or Mac + something else), where each host has a dedicated display.

For a workflow where you are also display switching (kvm etc), Synergy doesn't work well. You can technically use it when hosts are coming on/off display, but it's not designed for it. If you use a kvm-like workflow and have a Magic Touchpad, there's no easy solution without re-pairing, and I hope OPs tool works for this.

"with no Apple ID and no USB re-pairing dance. "

I was a long time user of CalDigit docks. Over a period of 3 years I think I had 3 fail. It's been a couple of years since I've used one in anger. We're onto TS5/TS5+. I think the last I used was the TS3+. But what I can say is... the technology just isn't there yet, for several reasons:

1. I liked to use a Bluetooth headset. What I really want is to pair the headset (or microphone or whatever device) with the dock, not the computer. As a result, switching just didn't work. And Bluetooth is finnicky at the best of times. This was a pain point;

2. The cables have a really high failure rate. I now buy at least 2 of any cable I buy because I expect one to be bad from the start or fail, particularly the cable between the Macbook and the dock. It has to carry power and a full TB load. 3 feet was best. 6 feet at the time was the longest it could go. I expect there have been teething problems with TB4/5 since. I'm actually curious about the Chinese GPMI standard/cable, as an aside;

3. Thunderbolt itself was generally good because it's well-supported by OSX, including DRMA support. But passthrough for HDMI/DP still felt like it had problems. It should be bulletproof. There's nothing worse than a monitor that might go black occasionally and you don't know why;

4. Generally speaking, handling this much bandwidth requires a lot of computing power. A dock is basically a 100G+ switch.

How so?