I’ve been using Synergy to share my mouse & keyboard between my Linux desktop and Mac laptop in the office.
One of the features of Synergy that hasn’t been working so well for me is the screen-saver synchronization. I’m not too picky, but I do want to be able to quickly lock both screens at once so I can leave the room without leaving a bunch of server terminals open to anyone who walks in!
After a little research, I found that Synergy’s X11 server code looks explicitly for Xscreensaver, but Ubuntu ships with gnome-screensaver, which has a different interprocess control API based on DBUS. This is apparently an issue of much contention, as a lot of video players and other apps haven’t updated to speak the new protocol, and you end up with screen savers activating during long-playing files and such.
One possibility is to manually reconfigure Ubuntu to use Xscreensaver, but it would probably be cuter to add support for the DBUS interface to Synergy.