Barrier with i3

Has anyone gotten barrier working? The server seems to work fine, the client seems to connect just fine, but it doesn’t actually work: there is no way of controlling the servers inputs. Would really love to get this working but I’m pretty stumped and about to give up.

Maybe this might be of some help:

Wow, I am clearly an idiot. I have some kind of brain defect when it comes to understanding what “client” and “server” mean in this context. For some reason I can’t fully articulate, it is abundantly obvious to me that the “server” should be the machine being controlled and the “client” should be the machine doing the controlling. Probably because this is how ssh works.

However, despite having read the admonitions in documentation many times, each time I took this as confirming what I was already thinking.

No, no, it’s clearly the server that does the controlling.

The congnitive dissonance between this and ssh is clearly more than I can handle.

When you think of it it appears logicial

  • a system providing a service is a server
  • and a system consuming a service is a client

The problem is that you often want to control a system offering a service - and thus the terms start to confuse.

I had the same issue with barrier which is why I specified the naming convention so any one reading it would understand hwo barrier uses the terms.

In fact there is no dissonance - see it this way

  • when you connect to a system using ssh
  • you can only do it because the system is offering a service
  • the system becomes a client of your system
  • because you are offering your keyboard as a service to the remote system

When you think in terms of who is offering what - it becomes more obvious which is the server and which is the client.

Yeah, that’s all fair enough, but the thing is that almost 100% of the time when I am using SSH I am using input devices on the client machine to execute programs on the server.

Entirely my fault, feel dumb, but I also sort of understand why I made the mistake.

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