Synergy 3 is gaining traction (and we’re finally talking about it)
I'll cut to the chase: it’s been a while since our last update. We launched Synergy 3 in 2023, and since then we've been working away furiously on incremental updates (not very exciting, so not a whole lot to talk about unless you like reading release notes).
A quick reality check
[Skip this bit if marketing stuff bores you.]
We’ve spent the last 18 months focused on improving stability, compatibility, and performance, and the results are showing: Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) has climbed from 30.4 in 2023 to 50 in 2025.
What’s NPS? It’s a simple benchmark that measures customer satisfaction and loyalty, on a scale from -100 to +100. An NPS of 50 is an indicator of great software; it means customers are mostly happy and recommending us to others which is a good sign we’re heading in the right direction. We spoke about NPS this a while ago and shared our goal of reaching 40 NPS which we have now smashed two years in a row! Next stop, 70 which is an indication of excellent software.
OK, enough talk about NPS. On to the technical stuff!
But the journey hasn’t been a straight line. In fact, Synergy 3 is still running on our v1.16 core, and that’s a limitation we’re actively addressing.
Synergy 1 is alive, and it’s getting upgrades
We haven’t abandoned Synergy 1 (despite the rumours). Far from it! It is used as the Core of Synergy 3, and Synergy 1 is the product we sell to our enterprise customers (Synergy 3 is not quite ready for business use). We’ve continued active development on Synergy 1, and recently released v1.18.0, which includes a major rewrite of the Windows service daemon among other improvements such as Wayland bug fixes.
Instead of using the legacy TCP-based daemon, we now use Qt local sockets for IPC (inter-process communication). This means:
- Less code overall and less complex code (translates to less bugs)
- More reliable (not roll-your-own)
You can check out the full PR on GitHub: symless/synergy#5
Coming soon: Synergy 3 will upgrade to this new v1.18 Core, replacing the current (frankly, crappy) daemon that I wrote a couple of decades ago (my new one is much better, promise). This will also free up TCP port 24801 for a new background service... [drum-roll] which we’re writing in Go!
Why not Rust? Good question.
Back in 2022, we said we were going all-in on Rust. And we meant it... at the time.
We actually built four separate Rust-based tools, and we still love the language for its safety and memory guarantees. But the reality is, Rust slowed us down. Maintenance cost was high, iteration speed was low, and the cross-platform ecosystem (especially GUI-related libs) isn’t fully there yet.
So we’re switching gears. Go gives us the balance we need: fast compiles, great cross-platform support, a far leaner dev/maintenance burden than Rust, and no NPM hell. Expect our new system service (replacing the current Node.js service) to be written in Go, and to be shipped in an all-new, lightweight Synergy 3 installer.
Wayland support is here (kind of)
Wayland users: we hear you. Yes, Synergy 3 and Synergy 1 both now support Wayland, and it's working well for pointer and keyboard sharing. We would like to share a special thanks to Peter Hutterer at Red Hat for making this possible.
That said, clipboard support is still pending, due to limitations upstream, and we know that’s important. We were originally waiting for that piece before announcing Wayland support officially, but given how long it's taking, we wanted to at least acknowledge what's working today. More updates coming as clipboard support progresses (it is being actively worked on).
What’s next?
We’re working hard on:
- Replacing the Node.js service with our new Go-based system service
- Upgrading Synergy 3 to the v1.18 core with the new local socket daemon
- Exploring Wails for a leaner cross-platform UI (because Electron is too bloaty)
- Delivering a streamlined Synergy 3 installer that’s smaller, faster, and cleaner
And yeah... expect more frequent updates from now on now that we're hiring a new marketing person who will gently nudge us devs, with a big stick, to post more frequently!