KDE Connect: Enabling communication between all your devices
kdeconnect.kde.org
kdeconnect.kde.org
Just earlier today I had my phone playing music connected to a bluetooth speaker. I was just getting to my computer and out of habit, hit the volume down media keys. I was surprised for a second when it worked, because immediately after hitting the key I remembered the speakers were connected to my phone, not the computer. Then I realized it was KDE Connect just working :)
A single pause command bridged four devices and it all just worked together. That's the true power of interoperable software standards.
Sadly, Google added a privacy constraint to Android, taking away the ability to monitor the clipboard in the background with no way to bypass the restrictions without rooting your phone. Automated clipboard sync was just great, and I'm sad to see it go.
It's not as magical as full automation, but still better than sending an email to myself or similar nonsense.
I think KDE in general needs better marketing. It is by far the best desktop environment available.
But how would the KDE community do that without spending money?
One of the unfortunate things I run into on social media is this idiotic perception that KDE is bloated and cumbersome, then when you drill down into the argument, you often find that these same people haven't used it for 10-15 years.
I'm not sure how you can fix branding perceptions that are based on fallacious experiences that weren't updated in the last decade, but I think some manner of user evangelism can also help!
I wouldn't bet that Xfce is that much lighter than Plasma nowadays (but definitively disable features like search indexing on slow hardware). On 2G of RAM, you probably should choose between KDE, LXDE, XFCE, maybe MATE (or lighter environments), the one you like the most. I can't say for Cinnamon ; probably fine. Gnome is probably too heavy.
[1] The Airis Kira Slimpad
I'm using plasma, the default for opensuse leap.
This happens too much with software - look at various open source filesystems that had reliability issues in the early days (which is pretty reasonable), someone writes a piece that highlights this and years later people are still parroting it as current insight - with the downside being that it can crush a project and thus in time make a self fulfilling legacy.
Similar to the OSX message app?
Agree on the better marketing. It wasn't obvious from the website.
Nope. Apple doesn't extend their messaging protocols to developers like that. But it does work perfectly fine on Android! There's both a QT5 and GTK interface for it, both of which are pretty fully featured and actively developed, and it syncs with your phones messages over WiFi or Bluetooth.
But KDE's desktop gets criticized for what it was when it tried 3D graphics at a time when Qt wasn't ready.
Edit: Build failed
Action: compile for libs/dbus:1.13.18-3 FAILED
*** Craft all failed: libs/dbus after 32 seconds ***
fatal error: package libs/dbus all failed[1] https://binary-factory.kde.org/view/MacOS/job/kdeconnect-kde...
Its been magical. At least with plasma, the system integration is full and the clipboard feature is a godsend. More power to KDE guys
On the other hand, that other application, while barebones, seems to work 100% of the time: https://github.com/whoozle/android-file-transfer-linux
I think I read somewhere that Android 10 forbids apps from managing the clipboard. Can anyone confirm this? I hold out hope that clipboard integration might work again...
Where does that appear? Its not on the button bar that appears over a text selection.
This is only for rooted devices so it's not really something most people are going to be able to do.
Also the feature I use most is pushing a website to my laptop so I can continue there later. With "My Phone" this works whether I am at home or out and about. Also it works when my laptop is currently not online. "KDE Connect" requires a VPN connection when I am not on the same network and the feature to push to another device doesn't work if that device is offline at the time. I understand that the difference is that one uses a server and one doesn't, and for some people not having Microsoft in the middle is an advantage but for others it is not.
I think KDE 4 was a big regression from KDE 3 in many ways.
After KDE 4 it got better and right now it's good again. Unfortunately, I've already made the switch to other desktop environments.
The initial releases of Gnome 3 were also a big regression from Gnome 2. Now Gnome 3 has gotten much better.
It would for sure have been nice to have a more feature-complete 4.0 release, but I don't see what the dev team could realistically have done better. There were only that many developers, so the only way would have been to further delay the 4.0 release, thus rendering KDE obsolete in a different way by not shipping anything for even longer.
Source: I was with the KDE dev team from about 2008-2012.
I think the KDE team is very productive and have influenced the desktop experience greatly. Much of that influence is not well understood but can be seen in all the descendants of Konqueror (almost every modern browser now).
The way docked windows work in KDevelop 3 was pretty nice. Then I saw it on other IDEs. I am not sure which came first.
KDE 1, 2 and 3 felt polished and detailed in their own ways. KDE 4 felt a bit like developer art.
I can imagine myself leveraging this on a smartwatch I recently bought to install postmarketOS on.
I guess having an OS worth very few maintainers compared to Linux, Windows or Mac leads to this kind of thing. But I still love it. Also, all the kde maintainers are active in #kde-freebsd on freenode so you can get quick and super knowledgeable help there. Advantage of small teams is that there's no 'just raise a ticket and we may look at it some day' mentality.
When I moved to it I had two minor issues. For one they gave me a small config change that fixed it. The other was a bug in a FreeBSD specific script and was fixed and moved to the live repo in 3 days. This was the kind of thing that would normally linger in an issue ticket for months or years. I was really impressed with how much they cared about these things. Thanks guys!
When watching a movie on the laptop, it's so handy to use the remote control to pause/play/change sound or move the timeline.
Now some stuff don't work so well: file transfer is flaky sometimes, sending a text from the laptop has a very primitive UI and I never seem to be able to share the clipboard when I want to.
But I love to ping my phone when it's lost in the house.
It usually works for me, but the problem I have is that sometimes the devices lose sync with each other if they've been off for any length of time. Opening the KDE Connect settings typically fixes this, but it's not ideal!
I absolutely love KDE Connect, though. Being able to copy text from a laptop to a desktop or use my phone to pause music if I happen to leave for a walk and forgot to stop it is great! I haven't used it yet, but they also have presentation controls for your phone including a pointer that uses the phone's instrumentation to move an animated circle across the screen. Love it!
A slightly better solution I have found helpful is to pull down Yakuake (or krunner) and run `kdeconnect-cli --refresh`. Beats having to open a QT window, only to be closed off immediately.
Poke around in here[1], I'm certain there's a build that works for most modern Windows 10 machines in here somewhere.
[1] https://build.kde.org/job/Applications/job/kdeconnect-kde/
On my Ubuntu I'm using gsconnect which implements the same protocol.
You can disable any plugins you find too risky. I haven't found any problem so far. All the servers and clients are open source so you can check the source and roll your own if you really want to.