In a similar vein, I am not on Gnome or KDE but have been using the basic kdeconnect functionality, such as sharing clipboard and transferring files, through kdeconnect-cli quite happily. It comes with the standard kdeconnect installation I believe.
sudo apt install kdeconnect --no-install-recommends
It shouldn't be so bad though, the whole set of packages is probably a couple hundred of MB, IIRC.