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Comment by ronreiter | Hacker News Reader

Nice. This is the best example I give for why Macs are great. Because they think about these things. This is a built in functionality in the Apple ecosystem.

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FWIW this is in KDE (via kdeconnect) too; I have it turned off. The only use case I personally have is copying passwords. In what way do you use it?

Usually copy pasting links/messages/images between desktop and mobile.

The difference is, speaking of Apple it's iPhone/iPad + Mac, which is super-useful, I don't even know how can you ask for a use-case, since everything is a use-case: copy anything from your phone to a computer, be it a text, an url, phone number, quote from a book/article you were reading. And speaking of KDE, it's just one KDE PC + another KDE PC, which is basically useless, since it's a rare person nowadays to be walking around with a KDE PC in his pocket.

So, yeah, I kinda hate Apple (I like my stuff configurable), but I wonder more and more how long is it until I drop other devices/OS', and buy an iPhone + MacBook.

No difference, it's KDE + android. Not only it has bidirectional clipboard syncing (so copy a 2FA token from the mobile to the PC) but also other nice features. Like if your phone is ringing, your PC will pause automatically YouTube or play music / spotify tabs on chrome. You can control PC media (e.g. again play music on chrome) from your phone, sync notifications uni or bidirectional, share/browse files, use the phone as a trackpad or keyboard for the PC, answer messages from the PC, etc.

Wow, that was a stupid mistake on my part. I don't know why I was convinced it doesn't work with Android. It is indeed really awesome.

And speaking of KDE, it's just one KDE PC + another KDE PC, which is basically useless, since it's a rare person nowadays to be walking around with a KDE PC in his pocket.

Nah. It's any Linux computer [0] <-> Android [1].

[0] KDE Connect works on Gnome as well.

[1] It can connect to any Android device as it has an Android app.

And as other's have commented, it has many more features than just the clipboard.

I'm using an iphone now and the biggest thing I miss from Android is KDE Connect which is not available on iOS.

I use the remote control feature to annoy my son - use phone as touchpad - but as Firefox can already sync my browser usage I don't need to move stuff around.

You can copy phone numbers, quotes, etc., I just never do. Given you can cloud store all of it, why bother with manual local sync.

In short it seems cool, just doesn't fit any workflow I use so I was curious what THEIR use case was.

KDE connect has an Android app that does this and most of the other stuff I assume Apple enables; I don't use Apple products, because I use Arch and Android.

Yep, KDE Connect is fantastic. I was really thrilled when after installing the mpris extension for Mopidy, I was able to see the current track playing, including album art, and pause/play with zero latency. That's just the icing on the cake of notification and clipboard mirroring.

On my Macs + iPhone the biggest use by far is for TOTP 2FA codes. Open app on iPhone, tap the right code, paste in field on Mac.

Also a feature of Windows 10 afaik. Possibly only an insider preview update.

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